are all immigrants voracious?

Dorcas has yet to meet an immigrant who isn't voracious and maintains that voracity is not necessarily a bad thing if you want to build a new nation -- like America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- but it's deadly for an established nation and led to the downfall of both the Roman and the British empires.

"At first it must have been novel for the indigenous Romans to have strange looking and speaking people making Rome their new home --new cuisine, fashion, ideas and cheap labor must have been a good thing," says Dorcas, “but over time, when more and more immigrants arrived, the indigenous Romans started to feel threatened."

"For starters, jobs for the poorer Romans disappeared -- it's always the working class that suffer first from immigration," sighs Dorcas, "but when native born immigrant children started strutting their stuff, demanding power and glory, the middle and higher classes of Romans started to suffer, too."

"In its imperial endeavors, the USA learned much from the mistakes of Rome and Britain," says Dorcas, "but being a nation built from scratch by voracious immigrants and tortured slaves it has a history to live down rather than live up to."

"Let's face it," says Dorcas, "Rome and Britain gave their empires as much, if not more, than they took -- think of roads and railways as well as citizenship -- and there was glory in what they did, definitely a history for present-day Italians and Brits to take pride in and look up to, even if they must suffer the indignity of being has-beens on the world stage – left with just the ruins of their past glories after voracious immigrants had moved in and taken over."

Read more by Dorcas on this issue:

social cohesion and survival

the empire strikes back

did roman citizenship cost the empire?

Let’s follow Japan on immigration

why did our ancestors migrate?

Our earliest ancestors were nomadic hunter and gatherer types, always on the move, and not much different in appearance and habits from the apes. The reasons that finally forced so many of them to leave their equatorial homelands to find new places to inhabit are very similar to the reasons that modern migrants give. Either there is a cataclysmic event - such as a flood or earthquake - or a social event such as a population explosion.

When populations reach a certain size over and above that which can be called comfortable and manageable, tribes tend to develop and with this phenomenon comes tribal warfare over all manner of issues - particularly food, space, mating and leadership.

In the vast and dense rainforest region of Equatorial Africa, it took millions of years before our ancestors had developed sufficiently to reach a population size that could be called crowded, but when that point was reached migration became a matter of survival.

Bearing in mind that our early ancestors were competing for food and space not only with each other but also with all manner of predatory or dangerous animals, the rainforest may have been a fecund area but it was also an extremely dangerous place to live.

Faced with depleting opportunities to find food, a mate, a safe place to sleep or merely congenial neighbors, most of our ancestors were literally forced out of their equatorial homeland. Others, more likely to be the migrants who traveled furthest - and from whom we owe our more direct evolutionary ancestry - had an adventurous or entrepreneurial streak and probably left long before they were pushed.

As animal species also evolved in all parts of the world, the overcrowded conditions in the rainforest caused the animals to explore new pastures, too; and in this scenario it's possible that our ancestors followed them as a source of food. With the hunters in pursuit, the animals moved further and further away from the rainforest until there was no going back for either of them - even if seasonal migration was their pattern.