The Civil Ways of Rome

It seems that some anti-immigration activists can’t tell the difference between citizens and noncitizens:

The publisher of a Spanish-language newspaper had to leave an immigration rally Sunday in Hazleton after a crowd surrounded him and began yelling for him to “get out of the country.”

Amilcar Arroyo, publisher of Hazleton-based El Mensajero, was covering the event when he was verbally attacked by a crowd who thought he was an illegal immigrant and a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit against Hazleton.

Arroyo is an American citizen and is not a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

In related news, there’s a new push to allow migrants - most of whom, as we all know, are either terrorists, rapists, drug dealers, leprosy carriers, or some overachieving combination thereof - to fight our illegal wars, in return for the privileges of official citizenship enjoyed by Mr. Arroyo:

A senior defense official expressed hope today that a provision in the stalled immigration bill that would have allowed some undocumented aliens to join the military won’t fall off the radar screen.

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, or DREAM, provision in the immigration bill was expected to help boost military recruiting, Bill Carr, acting deputy undersecretary of defense for military personnel policy, said today during a telephone conference with veterans’ group representatives.

In response to which, Wonkette draws an analogy that I find a bit...problematic:

You know, like when Rome couldn’t get enough Romans to serve in the legions because there were too many wars going on everywhere so they let barbarians join the legions in exchange for citizenship and then the Western Empire crumbled and the Dark Ages began?

Quite so. It was tolerable at the outset, when “those troops from the more barbarous subject states learned the civil ways of Rome.” But in the end, the influence of barbarian savagery can only have a corrupting effect on the civilized.

(Illustration: “Hanno Announcing to the Mercenaries the Emptiness of the Public Coffers,” by John Leech, 1852.)