On walls and immigration

When standing at Hadrian’s Wall on the border between Scotland and northern England, everything appears indistinguishably affluent and serene on both sides.

It was not nearly as calm some 1,900 years ago. In A.D. 122, the exasperated Roman emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of an 80-mile, 20-foothigh wall to protect Roman civilization in Britain from the Scottish tribes to the north.

We moderns often laugh at walls and fortified boundaries, dismissing them as hopelessly retrograde, ineffective or unnecessary. Yet they still seem to fulfill their mission on the Israeli border, the 38th parallel in Korea and the Saudi-Iraqi boundary, separating disparate states.

On the Roman side of Hadrian’s Wall there were codes of law, habeas corpus, aqueducts and the literature of Cicero, Virgil and Tacitus — and on the opposite side a violent, less sophisticated tribalism.

Hadrian assumed that there was a paradox about walls innate to the human condition. Scottish tribes hated Roman colonial interlopers and wanted them off the island of Britain. But for some reason the Scots did not welcome the wall that also stopped the Romans from entering Scotland.

The exasperated Romans had built the barrier to stop the Scots from entering Roman Britain, whether to raid, trade, emigrate or fight.

Today, the European Union has few problems with members that do not enforce their interior borders. But European nations are desperate to keep the continent from being overwhelmed by migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. Like the Romans, some individual EU nations are building fences and walls to keep out thousands of non-European migrants, both for economic and national security reasons.

Many Middle Easterners want to relocate to Europe for its material and civilizational advantages over their homes in Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Morocco or Syria. Yet many new arrivals are highly critical of Western popular culture, permissiveness and religion — to the extent of not wanting to assimilate into the very culture into which they rushed.

Apparently, like their ancient counterparts, modern migrants on the poorer or less stable side of a border are ambiguous about what they want. They seek out the security and bounty of mostly Western systems — whether European or American — but not necessarily to surrender their own cultural identities and values.

In the case of Hadrian, by A.D. 122 he apparently felt that Rome’s resources were taxed and finite. The empire could neither expand nor allow tribes to enter Roman territory. So his solution was to wall off Britain from Scotland and thereby keep out tribes that sometimes wanted in but did not wish to become full-fledged Romans.

The same paradoxes characterize recent, sometimes-violent demonstrations at Trump rallies, the