Victor Davis Hanson: Is the Age of American Empire Over or Just Beginning?

(Daily Signal)—President Donald Trump returned to Washington in January with a mandate from the American people to end mass migration. That same month, however, the foreign-born population living within America’s borders hit a record high, in an echo of the Roman Empire. Is it too late to save America from mass migration? Even if America is saved, will it be fundamentally changed in the process?

As a California farmer, Victor Davis Hanson faces the reality of this demographic change every day. As a historian and classicist, he knows all too well what happens to regimes and empires that fail to confront mass migration. This week, he joins “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss.

“Everybody,” Hanson told The Daily Signal, “is bewildered why [former President] Joe Biden, or whoever was controlling him, did this.”

Hanson described the pressure to keep migrants streaming into the country as “a consortium of interests” that include corporations (which desire cheap labor), other nations (which benefit from remittances), the cartels, and liberal ideologues.

Whatever the motivation, “it’s catastrophic,” Hanson said. January’s Current Population Survey from the Census Bureau found that America’s foreign-born population has surpassed 53 million. In percentage terms, that’s 15.8%, a full percentage point higher than the previous record set in 1890.

Hanson’s family has lived on a farm in Central California since 1870. “Where I live in the Central Valley is kind of ground zero, where people come up for agriculture or hospitality industry and it’s changed my life markedly.”

While the migrants of yesteryear might stay for a season, work on a construction site or in the fields, make some good money, and then go back to their home country, today’s migrants are staying.

“Where I live out in the country, if a person had a one-bedroom house or something, why not bring in Winnebagos or sheds,” Hanson said of the growing migrant population. “There may be 40 or 50 people living in a single-family zone residence.” Meanwhile, California citizens are punished by the regulatory environment for going about home improvements in the right way.

The end result is a governance structure that has two contradicting systems.

“It’s very strange about California,” Hanson said. “It’s the most regulated state in the country and it’s the least regulated.” While businesses have fled the state due to overtaxation, authorities simultaneously allow “a huge black market economy,” created by migrants, to flourish.

“It’s kind of disheartening when your family has been there since 1870 and you’re afraid to walk a quarter mile out of your house at night.”

America is not the only civilization that faced a crisis of this nature. “If you look at what I’d call [the] late republic, early imperial literature” of Rome, Hanson explained, “you get the Italian agrarian mindset, protocol, morality, and it’s now globalized and it’s diluted.”

During this early empire time period, there was “a lot of money being made in this global system of trade that Rome created.“

“And one of the things that’s happened is Rome has now become from 300,000 [people] to over a million,” Hanson continued. But “the number of people who are Italian or reflect that in the literature is considered dwindling, eroding, and you’ve got too many people from all over the world that are not on the same page.”

”There’s much more wealth, there’s much more technology, there’s much more leisure,” Hanson said, but “there’s no moral restraint” and “there’s no republic anymore.”

“It’s very similar to the United States,” Hanson added. “There was this kind of an agrarian American code that you see in movies of the 1930s and ’40s and now we’re … powerful, wealthier, but people are less happy or they don’t seem to reflect what the Founders thought the country should be. It’s the same dichotomy.”

All this raises the question of whether the age of the American empire is coming to an end or just beginning.

Hanson told The Daily Signal, “We’re in a transitional period.”

“Our globalization is the modern equivalent of an empire,” Hanson explained. “There’s still a sense inside the United States that we’re still operating under Republican principles, but there’s a doubt that these next generations are going to be able to continue that” due to the lack of civic education and moral decay. “They’ve been brought up on globalism.”