“Wolf Laib found work in New York City peddling bananas and other fruit on street corners, and began sending small sums of money back to the family,” reads an unpublished book about the family that one of Stephen Miller’s relatives shared with The New Republic. The book—which tells the story of some of Miller’s ancestors’ immigration to the United States and their subsequent thriving here—was written by Miller’s grandmother, Ruth Glosser. Now that Miller has accumulated such extraordinary power over the future of our immigration system, it’s worth turning to this remarkable document, which we’re making available online for the first time.
This story, of course, tracks with that of countless others who arrived in the United States as part of the great migration, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, between the 1880s and the 1910s, which numbered as high as 20 million. As the book notes, they were out to “escape economic hardships and religious persecution” to build a “better life for themselves and their children.”
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.”
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. To be sure, it is not a new move to bring up Miller’s ancestry in the context of his current nativism, and many aspects of Miller’s worldview are well-known in a scattershot way: his disdain for multiculturalism, his hatred of mass migration, his affinity with white nationalists.
That larger worldview—and its intellectual roots—deserve more scrutiny. Given Miller’s extraordinary power—his near unfettered control over President Donald Trump’s massive ramp-up in immigration enforcement—a deeper understanding of Miller’s views is essential. It demonstrates in a more vivid way the true extremism of his anti-immigrant project—and why it poses a serious threat to the country and its future.
Thanks to the 1924 act, the book notes, “the doors to free and open immigration here swung shut.” Fortunately, all of Wolf Laib’s immediate family made it to the United States by 1920, the book says, but many left behind did not fare well. “Those Jews who remained in Antopol were not so lucky,” ruefully recounts the book, which was first discussed in Hatemonger by journalist Jean Guerrero. It adds that most of those who remained in Wolf Laib’s town “were murdered by the Nazis.”
None of this necessarily means Miller is unconcerned about the fate of those who met terrible ends due to their inability to immigrate. But Miller offered those quotes about that century-old law as a device to describe his present-day vision, and, in a very real sense, 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 is, at bottom, trying to eradicate that set of obligations and values—to undo that larger consensus. To grasp this, you need to look at all the small things Miller is doing, which, taken together, all add up to one very big thing.
Yet the implementation of this has been corrupted, according to two former senior State Department officials who witnessed this firsthand.
Instead, word came down from State Department political appointees declaring that this had to happen simply because the order said so, the officials stated.
Strikingly, the administration is also reportedly mulling proposals to prioritize far-right European political actors, who are supposedly being persecuted for anti-immigrant views, for refugee status. Let’s be clear: It is now apparently U.S. policy to favor whites in the doling out of refugee admissions.
Critically, in moving to end all these things, Miller is feverishly stamping out every single avenue for those fleeing horrific conditions to come here legally that he possibly can. Republican presidents have traditionally set refugee admissions levels much higher than Trump has in both his terms, and TPS was signed into law by a Republican president, George H.W. Bush. In functionally ending all this, Miller is breaking with a consensus that has largely been bipartisan for decades.
While acceptances are still much higher than denials, those acceptances have been declining, Gelatt found, leading her to conclude that USCIS is “approving fewer applications and denying more.” And as of early December, after an Afghan refugee allegedly shot two West Virginia National Guard members in Washington, Trump suspended all asylum applications and all immigration applications from 19 countries.
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.
The Intellectual Roots of Miller’s Ethno-Nationalism
“If you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” Stephen Miller declared as the presidential campaign heated up in 2024, in a quote flagged by Media Matters for America. “Elect Joe Biden, and America becomes the Third World.”
Cull through lots of Miller quotes, and a clearer picture of this emerges. “Why would any civilization that actually wants to preserve itself allow for any migration that is negative to the country as a whole?” Miller seethed last spring. He also pointedly asked: “Do you know what happens to a civilization that allows for the large-scale migration of people who hate it?” Miller regularly describes migration as an “invasion” and insists that getting rid of undocumented immigrants would free up emergency rooms, playing on longtime tropes depicting migrants as bearers of disease. During the 2024 campaign, he told a right-wing podcaster that reelecting Biden would represent “the assisted suicide of Western civilization.”
When I asked Steve Bannon, a longtime Miller ally, which writers most influenced Miller’s view that migration threatens American or Western “civilization,” he texted me some names. The top three were Pat Buchanan, Samuel Huntington, and Oswald Spengler. I was unable to confirm from Miller himself whether he’s read these three authors. However, Miller plainly draws sustenance from a strain of right-wing thought that loosely includes those writers, as well as David Horowitz, who mentored Miller as he came of age politically in a diversifying high school in Santa Monica.
Conservative writers, to be sure, have long depicted the West as under siege, but in the hands of Buchanan and others like him, this took a more explicitly ethno-nationalist turn. As John Ganz explains in his excellent book, When the Clock Broke, Buchananism more directly draws inspiration from figures like former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke and white nationalist Sam Francis, and in this sense is a precursor to Trump—and, by extension, Miller.
Now compare that with Miller’s twin claims that if you “import the Third World, you become the Third World,” and that electing Biden would represent the “assisted suicide of Western civilization.” The United States is steward and inheritor of this disappearing civilization: Miller recently declared that “our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” and is under threat from assorted “enemies” who want to keep us in “darkness.” Among those enemies hell-bent on dragging us back into civilizational darkness are immigrants from the Third World and their globalist allies. In those emails to Breitbart, Miller made this clear. After Pope Francis declared in 2015 that the United States should be more open to immigrants who “travel north”—from Latin America—Miller drew parallels to The Camp of the Saints, the 1973 Jean Raspail novel, beloved by white nationalists, that depicts the West as under siege by teeming masses of Third World immigrants, who are depicted in virulently racist terms.
“The basic idea is that if you don’t come from a cultural background that comes from a traditional Western perspective—ideally Anglo-Saxon—then you aren’t equipped for and properly formed for freedom,” Laura K. Field, author of Furious Minds, a great new book about the intellectual roots of MAGA, told me. In this worldview, Field continued, without that shared philosophical, cultural, and ancestral foundation, “civilization is impossible.”
But all of this is wrong. And it’s a terrible basis for U.S. immigration policy.
Defenders of Miller might insist this assimilation happened because of post-1920s restrictionism, but the argument at the time was that they—a “they” that included his own forebears, remember—could not be assimilated at all because they were fundamentally unfit for it. And those immigrants defied such predictions because the United States turned out to have very powerful mechanisms of assimilation. In countless ways, that great migration positively redefined our “civilization,” which turns out not to be a static thing. Miller has in essence shifted the civilizational goalposts: If Southern and Eastern Europeans didn’t end up threatening U.S. civilization, well, the actual threat lies further afield, in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. Miller has simply moved the geographic lines of the civilizational charmed circle, dividing those who are fit to partake in our civilizational inheritance from those who are not.
Miller Is Wrong About “Social Trust”
“You cannot have migration without consent,” Miller insists. “That is a fundamental principle of having a civilization.” The second that undocumented immigrants settle in our communities, our social contract instantly dissolves, and our civilizational epoxy has come apart.
In saying these things, Rogan and all these others are articulating a deeper idea: As time passes and outsiders contribute to—and associate with—local communities, their original illegal entry loses significance, and they develop a claim to belonging. We recognize this because we see them as human, and human life is messy and complicated. Most people understand this intuitively: Communities are dynamic things; their boundaries are not fixed and rigid and unchanging. Polities can decide collectively to grant amnesty to people who didn’t enter perfectly by the book but have since demonstrated good intentions after a democratically determined amount of time has passed. And they are often made stronger by it.
Miller has long harbored particular venom for “cosmopolitanism.” He draws heavily on a tradition on the far right that treats cosmopolitanism as a threat to a model of Western civilization constructed upon the building blocks of ancient nations whose volkish identities stretch deep into the mists of the past.
In short, there are plenty of resources in our “Western inheritance” that run directly counter to, and are far more admirable than, Miller’s ideology of ethno-nationalist self-preservation. The 1965 immigration act that Miller hates so much—by ending the idea that some ethnicities are more “fit” to be American than others—itself carried forward some of those “Western” inheritances.
Miller Is Wrong to Want Net-Negative Migration
What’s more, demographers like William H. Frey have gamed out what a scenario of net-negative migration will look like over time, and it’s not pretty. It results in population decline, a dangerously aging workforce, and depleted tax revenues to pay for social insurance for our aging population.
That aside—even if the politics of the issue are brutal and we liberals haven’t solved that conundrum—the answer is not to throw immigration into reverse. As Jordan Weissmann puts it, “The fact that it is hard does not take away from one fundamental point: There is no real plan for economic stability or for a generous welfare state without more immigration. Full stop. Period.”
We need more immigrants, and there absolutely are ways to limit asylum and end the system’s failures while opening up more channels for orderly legal migration and for those here illegally to get right with the law. Miller’s project is to persuade you that immigration cannot be managed in the national interest. It can, and it’s on us to show how. Because at the end of the day, Miller is trying to restore ethnic engineering to the center of immigration policy. In so doing, he’s denying to millions the blessings that his ancestors and he himself have been so fortunate to enjoy.
“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.
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