No immigrants!
The president’s pet psychopath is, as they say, a piece of work. Greg Sargent offers 4,500 words or so on Stephen Miller’s obsession not only with stopping immigration by non-whites but with ethnically reengineering the United States to fit his mental image of Western civilization.
Stephen Miller would fail the John Cena challenge.
Miller’s Jewish family fled Antopol, once part of czarist Russia and now Belarus, for the United States between 1903 and 1920. “Wolf Laib [Glosser], 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.” Miller’s people. Sargent links to an unpublished work by Miller’s grandmother, Ruth Glosser, shared with The New Republic by Miller’s relations. “A Precious Legacy” chronicles the family’s arrivals in the U.S. and their subsequent striving and thriving. Perhaps Miller ought to read it.
Sargent writes:
Yet at the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. 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 United States was in the process of becoming. In this telling, as 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. The new arrivals, Ross said, had “submerged” that ancestral connection to the “pioneer breed,” setting the nation on a path to the “extinction that surely awaits it.”
Decades later, Japanese Americans, non-citizens and native born alike, would face the same and race-based discrimination. It landed over 100,000 of them in American concentration camps during World War II, as Rachel Maddow is now covering in her “Burn Order” podcasts. Miller is a type. Maddow finds another like him in the architect of that policy.
Now the driving force behind Donald Trump’s efforts to ethnically cleanse America of undesirable non-Europeans, Miller wants to see immigration all but stopped and pursues deportations with a fanaticism worthy of history’s darkest villains:
Miller’s obsession with sheer numbers—the amounts of various categories of immigrants who are either in the United States or trying to get here—borders on pathological. Take his handling of undocumented immigrants. Miller has repeatedly raged at Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for arrest numbers he deems too low. Since the summer, arrests have hovered at around 1,000 daily. But he’s demanding 3,000 arrests per day, a pace of about one million people per year. To that end, The New York Times reports, the administration has already shifted thousands of federal law enforcement personnel into deportations, hampering critical efforts to combat serious crimes like child and drug trafficking. What’s more, ICE itself is arresting a lot of undocumented immigrants who are not dangerous criminals, diverting resources away from arresting the latter.
Here’s the thing: 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. But it makes us less safe. Miller plainly places more importance on reducing the totals of people here—or trying to get here—than on removing people who pose any actual danger. He appears to be actively prioritizing shifting the ethnic mix of the country over public safety.
Borders on pathological? When a crazed T.E. Lawrence calls for no prisoners in an attack on retreating Turks, he’s working out anger from a past physical/emotional injury at their hands. And Miller’s call for no immigrants? One wants a child psychologist to ask him, “Show me on the doll where the immigrant hurt you.”
I encourage you to read the entire post. Sargent covers Miller’s intellectual mentors and “pathological” drive to roll back immigration policy to the 1920s.
Sargent concludes:
On this point, we’re giving the last word to Miller’s cousin on his father’s side, Alisa Kasmer. Over the summer, Kasmer posted a scalding Facebook takedown of Miller that made big news. She refused all subsequent interview requests. But she agreed to talk to me for this piece.
“We’re Jewish—we grew up knowing how hated we were just for existing,” Kasmer told me. “Now he’s trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from: that ability to create a life for themselves, to prosper, to build community, to have successful businesses—to live a rewarding life.” This—not “saving” our “dying” country, as Miller absurdly claims Trump is doing—will be Miller’s ugly legacy.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
