
Fears of immigration in ancient Rome and today - diodorus
https://eidolon.pub/barbarians-inside-the-gate-part-i-c175057b340f
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wtbob
Of course, one should bear in mind what eventually happened to Rome…

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cynicalkane
Since the late 300s there was a repeating pattern where German tribes would
want to become part of Rome (initially, fleeing the Huns), and the Romans
would respond with acts of astonishing racism.

The first revolt of 376 began when the Romans reneged on land grants to the
Goths (who were refugees from the Huns) and allowed them to starve. The
proximal cause of its fall were anti-German riots in the Roman capital, where
the wives and children of the German troops were massacred; leading the Gothic
leader Alaric's troops to openly revolt where they were previously loyal to
Rome.

So the fall of Rome has a lesson about the treatment and acceptance of
foreigners, but maybe not the one you had in mind.

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mc32
But didn't pluralistic and non pluralistic empires come and go back then? Did
pluralism or non pluralism actually make a difference in the decline of
empires?

If anything the Chinese who were ruthless in rule were able to keep things
going the longest.

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qiqing
China was also very open to immigration and inclusive in what counted as
"Chinese."

~~~
linuxkerneldev
> China was also very open to immigration and inclusive in what counted as
> "Chinese."

I'm pretty sure this claim is invalid. Say you took a measure of genetic
diversity in various populations, I'm pretty sure you would find that Han
Chinese are less heterozygotic than other neighbouring Asian populations. Take
for example, their Southern neighbour, India, I predict you see far more
genetic variation. I think this maps out to just looking at phenotype
variation. I have travelled a bit through South East Asia and India, and just
looking at visible attributes like skin color, eye color, hair color, and so
on, one sees huge variation, also their languages are distinct (not even from
a single linguistic family like Sino-Tibetian). In contrast, in China, where I
have lived in, I found that the amount of variation was much smaller (just
small differences between Northern Chinese and Southern Chinese) which I
predict corresponds with much lower genetic diversity and thus the "openness
to immigration" is quite suspect.

~~~
qiqing
Here's an interesting pickle about linguistic diversity: Jane Austen is
roughly temporally equidistant between modern day and Shakespeare, yet our
level of mutual intelligibility is so much higher.

What changed? Standardization (such as printing a standard dictionary)
drastically reduced the rate at which languages evolved. And one major
historical difference between China and India is a history of unification,
starting with the Qin Dynasty, which introduced dictionaries, standardized
weights and measures, a single currency, and standard widths of roads. They
were brutal in their implementation and it ultimately led to popular revolt,
but the standards stuck. However, that would not be the last attempt at
unification. In China's history, there have been repeated efforts at unifying
an empire, splitting into multiple nations, re-unification, rinse, repeat.
Have you noticed that all the terms that translate into "ethnic Chinese" in
English are named after dynasties? At one point in time, identifying oneself
as "Han" was like saying "I'm an American." Sure, my ancestors are a mix of Wu
and Manchurian, but now we're part of the Han Nation. Or a different mix of
other ethnicities for the Tang Dynasty.

To put it another way, let's say the EU became one nation that lasted at least
a century. People who previously identified as "German" or "Italian" (or
Anglos? Saxons? Celts?) all self-identify as European. Fast forward another
century. The empire is expanding, and Central Asia is part of the equation
now, so European is defined "as opposed to" another group, but another
unification event happens, and now everyone on that continent refers to
themselves as Eurasian. And sometimes, on the East Coast, there's an influx of
Australian immigrants which adds up over the next century. How arbitrary is it
to say that Eurasia is 95% Eurasian?

As for visual phenotype difference between Northern and Southern Chinese being
"minor" \-- these differences look very pronounced to me. Yet I have trouble
telling the difference between, say, British and German people, for instance.

Maybe we're just trained on different data sets?

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seren
One of the theory on face recognition is that we learn to recognized people by
"storing" the difference between an average face and the people we are looking
at. And we build that average face from the sum of all people we met.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-
race_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect)

So indeed the different training set has a big impact.

