With less than a week to go before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump is warning darkly of an imminent immigrant “invasion,” deploying thousands of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, releasing a racist ad on Twitter, and threatening to issue an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship.
The president has, in pundit-speak, found his “closing argument” for the 2018 campaign season.
Indeed, many savvy observers in recent weeks have interpreted Trump’s efforts to inflame national tensions around immigration as a desperate, last-ditch ploy to save his party’s at-risk congressional majorities. But while the president himself may be acting on some mix of impulse and improv, the roots of the strategy go deeper—and its architects in the West Wing are looking far beyond the current election cycle.
To understand the thinking behind Trump’s gambit, it is necessary to spend a few minutes inside the head of Stephen Miller, the 33-year-old speechwriter and senior policy adviser to the president. A fierce immigration hawk who’s championed a right-wing nationalist agenda, Miller is Trump’s most trusted adviser on immigration, and he is constantly looking for new ways to push his policy priorities into the national spotlight. Earlier this year, it was reported that Miller was leading an effort within the administration to crack down on immigrants in the run-up to the midterms. And as Politico reported Wednesday, Trump’s latest string of provocations—from the immigrant-caravan scaremongering to the likely unconstitutional executive order—represents a “dream come true” for Miller. According to Miller, Trump benefits politically any time Americans are focused on immigration—no matter how bad the headlines, no matter how bleak the polls, no matter how big the controversy. “You have one party that’s in favor of open borders, and you have one party that wants to secure the border,” he told The New York Times earlier this year. “And all day long the American people are going to side with the party that wants to secure the border. And not by a little bit. Not 55–45. 60–40. 70–30. 80–20. I’m talking 90–10 on that.”
.. Even setting aside the hyperbole, this view of the electorate is debatable. (Voters seem to have given Trump mixed reviews on his handling of the caravan, for example.) But it’s still worth understanding how Miller lays out his political calculus. While he may be a committed ideologue, he works for and with a lot of Republicans who are guided more by opportunism than by ironclad conviction when it comes to immigration. The long-term relevance of his sharply nativist politics within the GOP will depend in part on the Miller faction’s ability to keep selling it as a winning strategy (even in the face of evidence to the contrary)... “The future of the Republican Party should be tapping into … the feeling of belonging and meaning and pride that comes with being part of this whole ‘America First’ movement,” he told me. “There’s something really beautiful about people from all different walks of life … who are bound together by this big idea about American identity, and American unity, and American interests.”.. Continuing in concern-troll mode, Miller said, “I think one of the big challenges facing modern liberalism is that there’s not a great emotional appeal to an international identity, like a citizen-of-the-world identity.”.. “Look, the current nation-state model is the product of thousands of years of political, social, and cultural evolution,” Miller said. “I mean, it was only recently, in like the last few decades, that people have tried to create an organizing principle larger than the nation-state.” The desire to root for your own native country is “intrinsic” to human nature, he told me. “You see that flag, you sing the national anthem, or you hear your team wins the gold medal … it creates a kind of pride in you that is really hard to translate.”.. “Find today your most liberal friend, and ask them this question: Who has more of a right to a job in America—a U.S. citizen, or an illegal immigrant? And if they don’t say U.S. citizen like that”—Miller snapped his fingers—“then that means on some philosophical level they find the idea of America First objectionable.”.. “But the idea of having official membership in the nation-state, and therefore that state has an obligation to protect you”—that was the big idea he believed voters would keep coming back for. Voters feel that connection at a visceral level, Miller suggested, and in the end they would always side with a president offering that appeal.
Will Anyone in the Trump Administration Ever Be Held Accountable for the Zero-Tolerance Policy?
Yet the government never had a plan for keeping track of the separated parents and children once they were in custody, and, even after a federal judge in San Diego, Dana Sabraw, ordered the government to reunite them, it struggled to comply. “I definitely haven’t seen contrition,” an Administration official, who told me about the weekly meetings, said. “But there was frustration with the incompetence of how zero tolerance got implemented. From the perspective of the political leaders here, there’s recognition of how badly the policy failed.” The lesson, according to the official, didn’t seem to be that the Administration had gone too far in separating families but, rather, that “we need to be smarter if we want to implement something on this scale” again.
.. The main focus, the official added, has been to “map out” how the government can detain asylum seekers as they wait for a hearing before an immigration judge, which can take several months: “The job is to model all the steps in the process. If we go after families, where do we detain them? What are the resources required at each step?”
.. To date, no one in the Trump Administration has been held accountable for its family-separation policy, even after evidence has steadily mounted as to its immense human costs and administrative failures.
.. The government’s own data show that it has had no appreciable effect on migration patterns throughout the summer, but the Administration pursued the policy anyway
.. the prime movers behind zero tolerance were members of a “cabal of anti-immigration guys” at the White House, the D.H.S., and the Department of Justice. Stephen Miller and a Justice Department adviser named Gene Hamilton
.. They want to have a different America, and they’re succeeding. Now they’re doubling down—they’re making another run at lowering the number of refugees who are admitted to the United States.
.. The failure of the zero-tolerance policy has done little, if anything, to diminish the group’s standing; on the contrary, Miller has only seemed to gain allies in the government. Within the President’s inner circle, according to the Times, he is considered a “walking policy encyclopedia” on immigration.
.. it was Border Patrol agents at C.B.P., not ice officers, who took children from their parents’ arms.
.. During the summer, the commissioner of the agency, Kevin McAleenan, denied that the Trump Administration was deliberately separating families, even as he directed implementation of a policy doing just that.
.. Ronald Vitiello, the deputy commissioner of C.B.P. and a law-enforcement veteran, was tapped to replace Thomas Homan as the director of ice.
.. Some five hundred and sixty children are still separated from their parents, including twenty-four who are five years old or younger
.. families face a choice: either a parent and child can agree to be deported together, or the child can stay in this country alone while her own case is decided.
.. I asked the current Administration official whether the outcry over family separation had caught the government by surprise. It had, the official said. “The expectation was that the kids would go to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, that the parents would get deported, and that no one would care.” Yet, when it became clear that the public did, the Administration chose not to change course.
Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.
If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.
He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English.
.. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.
.. What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.
I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.
.. I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.
.. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America first” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees.
Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.
As in past generations, there were hate mongers who regarded the most recent groups of poor immigrants as scum, rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists, but largely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream... blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions. After all, Stephen’s is not the only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration. Trump’s grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the run from military conscription to a new life in the United States, and his mother fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City. (Trump’s in-laws just became citizens on the strength of his wife’s own citizenship.).. These facts are important not only for their grim historical irony but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump... In the early 2000s, Joseph (not his real name) was conscripted at the age of 14 to be a soldier in Eritrea and sent to a remote desert military camp. Officers there discovered a Bible under his pillow which aroused their suspicion that he might belong to a foreign evangelical sect that would claim his loyalty and sap his will to fight. Joseph was actually a member of the state-approved Coptic church but was nonetheless immediately subjected to torture. “They smashed my face into the ground, tied my hands and feet together behind my back, stomped on me, and hung me from a tree by my bonds while they beat me with batons for the others to see.”.. Joseph was tortured for 20 consecutive days before being taken to a military prison and crammed into a dark unventilated cell with 36 other men, little food and no proper hygiene. Some died, and in time Joseph was stricken with dysentery. When he was too weak to stand, he was taken to a civilian clinic where he was fed by the medical staff. Upon regaining his strength, he escaped to a nearby road where a sympathetic driver took him north through the night to a camp in Sudan where he joined other refugees. Joseph was on the first leg of a journey that would cover thousands of miles and almost 10 years... Before Donald Trump had started his political ascent promulgating the false story that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, while my nephew, Stephen, was famously recovering from the hardships of his high school cafeteria in Santa Monica, Joseph was a child on his own in Sudan in fear of being deported back to Eritrea to face execution for desertion.
.. In all of the countries he traveled through during his ordeal, he was vulnerable, exploited and his status was “illegal.” But in the United States, he had a chance to acquire the protection of a documented immigrant.
.. Today, at 30, Joseph lives in Pennsylvania and has a wife and child. He is a smart, warm, humble man of great character who is grateful for every day of his freedom and safety. He bears emotional scars from not seeing his parents or siblings since he was 14. He still trembles, cries and struggles for breath when describing his torture, and he bears physical scars as well.
.. I have met Central Americans fleeing corrupt governments, violence and criminal extortion; a Yemeni woman unable to return to her war-ravaged home country and fearing sexual mutilation if she goes back to her Saudi husband; and an escaped kidnap-bride from central Asia.
.. Trump wants to make us believe that these desperate migrants are an existential threat to the United States; the most powerful nation in world history and a nation made strong by immigrants. Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human.
Trump publicly parades the grieving families of people hurt or killed by migrants, just as the early Nazis dredged up Jewish criminals to frighten and enrage their political base to justify persecution of all Jews.
Almost every American family has an immigration story of its own based on flight from war, poverty, famine, persecution, fear or hopelessness. Most of these immigrants became workers, entrepreneurs, scientists and soldiers of America.
.. Most damning is the administration’s evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country of origin and religion. No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of justice are the gateway to tyranny. Today others may be the target, but tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me. History will be the judge, but in the meantime the normalization of these policies is rapidly eroding the collective conscience of America.
‘Immigration hypocrite’: Stephen Miller’s uncle lambastes him in scathing op-ed
Wolf-Leib Glosser fled violence from his small Eastern European village, and with $8 to his name, came to Ellis Island. His children soon followed, and his children’s children were born in the American city of Johnstown, Pa., where the family grew and prospered.
Such is what “chain migration” was like at the turn of the 20th century, and such is the “classically American tale” of the ancestors of White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, according to a scathing op-ed written by David S. Glosser, Miller’s uncle, in Politico.
.. “I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” Glosser wrote in the op-ed published Monday.
.. Had the very same immigration policies his nephew “so coolly espouses” been in effect at the turn of the 20th century, when the family’s patriarch, Wolf-Leib, left the small village of Antopol to escape persecution of Jews, Miller’s ancestors would have been “wiped out” before they could make it to the United States, Glosser wrote. They would not have been able to sell goods out of a horse-drawn wagon in Johnstown and grow the business into a haberdashery and, years later, to a supermarket chain and discount department stores run by the next generation of Glossers, including Izzy, Miller’s maternal grandfather.
I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him,” Glosser wrote.
.. “The detention of those thousands of children and separation from their parents was a bridge too far,” he told The Washington Post.
.. The post was prompted by Miller’s visit to Johnstown that month, when the Trump campaign held a rally there. Miller talked for a few minutes about how the small Pennsylvania city became home to his immigrant ancestors.
“Four generations of my family have lived in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. My mother was born and raised in Johnstown. My grandfather was born and raised in Johnstown. My great-grandfather was born and raised in Johnstown. And my great-great-grandfather came here from overseas to start his American Dream,” Miller told the crowd.
.. Miller is not the only member of the Trump administration whose ancestors came to the United States to join family members. The president himself benefited from “chain migration,” or family reunification, on both sides of his family, as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote. The same process allowed first lady Melania Trump to sponsor her parents to come to the United States. Viktor and Amalija Knavs became naturalized citizens last week.