“The document tells the story of Miller’s Russian Jewish ancestors who fled persecution and pogroms, arriving at Ellis Island in 1903 to build new lives in America. Sargent uses this family narrative as a lens to examine the bitter irony at the heart of Miller’s career: The man whose ancestors fled persecution now oversees a draconian campaign to terrorize immigrants—wielding state power against the most vulnerable in a bitter repudiation of his own family’s history”
“Stephen Miller’s ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903. That’s when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser disembarked at Ellis Island after leaving behind his hometown in Antopol, a small town in the part of the czarist Russian empire that is now Belarus. Laib, who was fleeing a life marked by anti-Jewish pogroms and forced conscription, quickly set about trying to raise more money to bring over relatives.”
“at the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the U.S. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race—it was rooted in the “scientific racism” of the day. But it also involved a somewhat different claim: that the new arrivals suffered from a “social degeneracy” or “social inadequacy”—two typical phrases at the time—which rendered them a threat to the “civilization” the U.S. was in the process of becoming”
“prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross declared in a 1914 broadside, these new immigrants were inferior to Americans who descended from the “pioneer breed” who’d given birth to the American nation”
“As historian Gary Gerstle, author of the great book American Crucible, noted in an email to me, many nativists at the time lamented the “civilizational vulnerability” of the U.S., believing that “white, Christian, and western European culture” stretching back to “ancient Greece and Rome” represented the “summit of human achievement” and the core of American civilization. This was under dire threat from “groups outside that culture” who were “unassimilable, with Jewish ranks full of Bolsheviks and Italian ranks full of anarchists.””
“More than a century later, those diatribes about people like Miller’s ancestors are very similar to claims Miller makes today about the threat to “civilization” supposedly posed by those emigrating from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere”
“Miller has outlined something more comprehensive and sinister—an elaborate worldview that has escaped notice in the mainstream media. It centers immigrants as a threat to “civilization” in terms that echo the rhetoric of those determined to exclude people like his ancestors.”
“the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended ethnic quotas for immigration created in 1924”
“Miller is extolling the impacts of the 1924 measure. He was even more direct in 2015 emails to Breitbart obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He repeatedly praised President Calvin Coolidge for signing that law, describing the act rhapsodically as Coolidge’s “heritage” and suggesting the country should act “like Coolidge did”; that is, either dramatically restrict immigration or impose new ethnic quotas on it”
“his true ideological project is to unmake the world the 1965 act created when it ended the ethnic quota system and opened the country to more immigration from all over the world”
“Miller’s grander aims are best understood as an effort to destroy the entire architecture of immigration and humanitarian resettlement put in place in the post–World War II era”
“.S. law has enshrined the right to seek refuge here and protections against getting sent home to face persecution or grave danger—and a set of values that, theoretically at least, has been to some degree a bipartisan consensus for decades”
“Miller is, at bottom, trying to eradicate that set of obligations and values—to undo that larger consensus”
“Miller’s obsession with sheer numbers—the amounts of various categories of immigrants who are either in the U.S. or trying to get here—borders on pathological”
“Miller’s mission of boosting deportation numbers of necessity requires arresting people who are not criminals or gang members—people who have jobs and have become integrated into U.S. communities—because there’s no other way to get the removals up”
“He appears to be actively prioritizing shifting the ethnic mix of the country over public safety”