The Goths Became More Roman Than Romans. So Why Did Rome Still Collapse?
An immigration blackpill for everyone with opinions about ICE raids
It’s 376 CE, the Danube riverbank. Tens of thousands of Gothic refugees are massed at the Roman border, desperate, starving, fleeing the Huns. Roman officials stand on the opposite bank, panicking about culture. These people are barbarians. They speak a Germanic tongue, not Latin. They cook with butter, not olive oil. They braid their hair weird. They fight in the nude. Let them in, and what happens to civilization?
Ammianus Marcellinus describes the scene with the barely concealed horror of someone watching their Ivy League roommate eat Velveeta straight from the package: “the barbarians were crossing the river day and night, without ceasing, in ships and rafts and canoes made of hollow tree trunks.”
The Roman Senate debates. Traditionalists argue this will pollute Roman culture, destroy civic virtue, end civilization. The emperor, desperate for military manpower, overrules them. The Goths are admitted as federated allies, settlement rights in return for military service. Roman elites lose it. One senator compares it to “introducing wolves into the sheepfold”, an ancient Tucker Carlson doing his concerned-face thing. Another warns that Roman youth will be corrupted, Latin contaminated, cultural integrity finished. “They’re not sending their best people.”
Sound familiar?
Fast-forward to February 2026. ICE is conducting raids in sanctuary cities while Tom Homan does perp walks for the cameras like he’s collecting Pokémon cards. Meanwhile in Europe, AfD is having its best polling ever as Germans panic about Islamization, Marine Le Pen is centimeters from the Élysée, and the British are discovering that voting for Brexit because of Polish plumbers didn’t actually stop the boats.
The discourse is so predictable: one side screaming about civilizational collapse, shared values under threat, the barbarians literally inside the gates. The other side with their “no human is illegal” lawn signs, their breathless threads about how immigration built this country, their quotes from Emma Lazarus that they definitely didn’t just Google five minutes ago. Both have their scholars: restrictionists invoking Gibbon like he’s scripture, progressives citing academics with “Migration Studies” in their title.
Both think they’re vindicated by history. Both have their evidence, their think tank funding, their viral threads, optimized for their respective algorithm bubbles.
Both sides are catastrophically wrong, and for reasons that reveal something genuinely strange about how cultural change actually works.
Let me show you exactly how this happened. Because the details are weird and uncomfortably relevant to 2026. Let’s go.
