I've had a strange preoccupation lately with the concept of "empire collapse" - the point at which a once stable empire's governance over it's people begins to fail, and eventually ceases to be able to manage it's territory, until it ultimately dissipates into a number of warring factions and/or outside influencers.

Originally I was attracted to the topic because the ascent of populist outsider candidates to power in the USA was similar to symptoms of political stress in historic empire systems. But after watching Brexit unfold so suddenly, it's become pretty clear to watch history in realtime, the United Kingdom is truly the empire in the very last stages of collapse to follow.

One thing the author of this article kind of misses out on however, is that empires don't just open the doors to immigration for no reason. Usually immigrants are brought in from the frontiers to act as a labor source when the native population becomes majority upper and middle class - too educated and wealthy to keep doing manual labor. This of course leads to accusations of a "foreign invasion", but the foreign labor is necessary to keep the wheels of commerce moving and everything just starts going to hell from there. It's really not an uncommon problem in history. The "barbarians" of Rome were