August 13, 2018: Stephen Miller - Architect of Hate

 

8/13/18: White House aide Stephen Miller comes under attack from an unexpected direction. Miller is a leading architect of Trump administration immigration policy. In that role he has pushed for an array of limits, including curtailing legal immigration. Chain migration, Miller says, must end, not counting the First Lady’s family (see: 8/9/18). The “zero tolerance” policy, separating parents and children seeking asylum at the border, leading to children barely old enough to talk being locked up in cages, was a Miller initiative. Last year the number of refugees allowed to enter the country legally was cut to the lowest level in four decades. The total was capped at 45,000, even though a coalition of religious groups hoped to see at least 75,000 admitted. Miller’s fingerprints were all over that policy too. 

Stephen Miller - happy to lock children up in cages.

 

“What would have become of the Glossers?” 

Now Team Trump is advancing plans to reduce the flow to 25,000. One former Trump official told reporters that with Miller whispering sweet anti-immigrant nothings in his ear, the president has considered going as low as 5,000 refugees. 

Why has Miller been so keen on the idea of cutting immigration? And why is Trump so happy to listen? Politico recently explained. Miller was not “deterred” by the child separation disaster, one GOP source said. 

“He is an adamant believer in stopping any immigration, and the president thinks it plays well with his base.”

 

Miller was distraught in the aftermath of the zero tolerance fiasco, said two Republicans close to the White House. He considered zero tolerance an essential component to his efforts to deter immigration. For his troubles, he got heckled at D.C. restaurants, prompting him in one instance angrily to pitch $80 worth of takeout sushi into a trash bin.

 

Protesters showed up at his apartment complex chanting, “Stephen Miller/You’re a villain/Locking up/innocent children.”

 

Now Miller is taking heat from his family. In an editorial, his uncle David S. Glosser lays down the story of Miller’s roots. Glosser begins: “Let me tell you…about Stephen Miller and chain migration.” 

In the face of “violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army” a Russian Jew named “Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.” 

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. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweat-shop toil Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hard-working immigrants.

 

The family set out in dogged pursuit of the American Dream. First, they sold goods out of a horse-drawn wagon. Next came the purchase of a haberdashery. Over the years the Glossers built up a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores. The family business “was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time.” 

What does this have to do with Miller? His mother was a Glosser and sister of the editorialist. 

David Glosser is harsh in assessing his nephew’s anti-immigrant stance: 

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 would likely have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews [emphasis added] who remained in Antopol [the Glosser’s ancestral village].

 

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 goes on to outline the president’s own immigration story. Friedrich Trump, his grandfather, left Germany to avoid military service and came to the U.S. in 1885. Avoiding service is a Trump family tradition. 

Trump’s mother “fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City.” 

Today, two like-minded men, Miller and Trump, are working in tandem to slam the door on people who would come here for the same reasons their ancestors did.