A thousand years of unintegrated immigration

After the pro-immigration political left succeeded in elections in both the United Kingdom and France – and also in the European elections in Finland – I recalled an entry I wrote in 2019 on my Finnish-language blog. I have therefore decided to translate it into English. So here it is, dear readers!

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One of the critical issues for Europe in the 21st century is immigration from developing countries. Particularly important is the question of how large the new population, which has a negative impact on its environment, will become. In other words, how many of the newcomers will fail to integrate into European societies and contribute to maintaining its welfare.

In relation to this question, I read an interesting research report that studied the DNA of people buried in the area of ancient Rome over thousands of years. This gave insight into how the population of the area had developed.

Before the development of agriculture, the Romans belonged to the group of Western European hunter-gatherers, but with the advent of agriculture, people of Anatolian and Iranian origin arrived in the area. During the Copper and Bronze Ages, the proportion of the hunter-gatherer population or their descendants increased again in the area, but the Anatolian-Iranian genetic makeup remained dominant.

By 900 BCE, the population had received a significant influx of people from the steppe regions of Eastern Europe and from Iran. Additionally, some people arrived from Western North Africa. This population genetically closely resembled modern-day Romans.

However, Rome grew and its population became more diverse. People came particularly from the east, from the areas of present-day Greece, Malta, Cyprus, Jordan, and Syria, as well as from Anatolia and Iran, to the extent that these population groups made up a significantly larger proportion of the city's inhabitants than the descendants of Iron Age Romans.

The situation changed in the Middle Ages when the genetic makeup of Rome's population reverted to being largely similar to that of Central and Northern Europe. At the same time, the metropolis of a million people from antiquity collapsed into a city of about 100,000 inhabitants. In other words, as Rome fell, its multicultural society from ancient times disintegrated, leaving behind only the original Iron Age-like population, while other population groups moved elsewhere.

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According to the study, a multicultural society is nothing new in Europe, as even in antiquity, large cities attracted people from great distances. Part of that population certainly consisted of slaves, who are estimated to have made up as much as a third of Rome's population, but there must have also been a large number of free professionals among them.

The biggest difference compared to modern times was probably that newcomers to Rome were not known to be pampered with welfare services – unless slavery is counted as such – but had to earn their living themselves. Thus, the disappearance of the population with the collapse of the great empire is understandable as the basis for their livelihood vanished.

Reflecting on modern times, I was nonetheless surprised by the associated population genetic change, as the Roman Empire, and thus also the multicultural city of Rome, lasted for about a thousand years. One might have thought that there would have been a lot of intermarriage between the city's population groups and/or that families from elsewhere would have at least established themselves as respected inhabitants of the city.

If that had been the case, the genetic composition of the city's population should have remained roughly the same when it collapsed. Since this did not happen, it can be concluded that even a thousand years was not enough for the multicultural population of Rome to integrate.

This should be remembered when discussing Finnish - as well as European - immigration policy. If and when we accept large numbers of people from cultural backgrounds different from our own, they will remain a separate segment from the majority population for up to a thousand years, even if they are integrated into the workforce.

As such, they will also leave our northern country immediately if living conditions here deteriorate. Right now, this would particularly mean the deterioration of welfare state services for some of our immigrant groups.

Previous thoughts on the same topic:
French Election Results: A Deep Dive into Tactical Voting and Its Implications
Elections in the UK: A Shift Toward Hand-Waving Politics?
The European Parliament elections were a celebration for the far-left in Finland