The Dark Ideology Behind Stephen Miller's Immigration Crusade: Part II
He believes immigration threatens Western civilization itself, echoing the same xenophobia once directed at his own ancestors
Dear Readers:
Yesterday, we published Part 1 of Greg Sargent’s brilliant critical profile of Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff, that was originally featured in The New Republic. As Sargent powerfully pointed out, the man whose Russian Jewish forebears once fled persecution is now unleashing the machinery of the state to terrorize immigrants seeking the same refuge his family once sought.
To read Part 1, go here:
Today, as promised, we bring you Part 2—which concludes his essay. I’ll make the same ask as yesterday: Please read and share widely.
Berny Belvedere
Senior Editor
“If you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” Stephen Miller declared as the presidential campaign heated up in 2024. “Elect Joe Biden, and America becomes the Third World.”
This is one of the single most revealing quotes Miller has ever uttered. At the core of Miller’s worldview is the idea that the immigration levels and humanitarian resettlement programs that existed under Biden posed an existential threat to American civilization, whereas those that now exist under Trump will preserve it from ruin and even outright extinction. During a Cabinet meeting in October, Miller gushed to Trump: “This was a country on the verge of dying, and you alone saved it.” This was widely mocked, but Miller meant it quite literally.
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.”
Note that Miller treats it as self-evident that most immigrants to the United States are either “negative to the country” or “hate” it. You see, it’s where these immigrants are coming from that determines whether they pose this existential, civilizational threat. As Miller himself put it: Import the Third World, and you become the Third World.
Buchananite Beginnings
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.
This strain holds roughly that “Western civilization” is something like a static cultural inheritance forever teetering on the edge of plunging into terminal decline. That’s usually due to standard maladies—globalization, mass Third World migration, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism, which emphasizes our common humanity across borders—that threaten civilization’s dissolution or obliteration. America’s status as an inheritor of the best of “Western civilization” is perpetually on the brink of annihilation.
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.
The similarities between Miller’s language and that of Buchanan—and others writing in a similar vein—are obvious. Buchanan wrote a 2011 book called Suicide of a Superpower. In a companion column, Buchanan declared that “Western civilization” probably won’t “survive the passing of the European peoples whose ancestors created it and their replacement by Third World immigrants.” Buchanan lamented the coming extinction of the “white race” and “European peoples” whose ancestors are credited with creating the “civilization that came out of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and London.” If the white race passes, civilization disappears with it.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
In Miller’s formulations relative to Buchanan’s, all that’s missing is the word “white.” To be sure, Miller has adamantly denied ties to explicit white nationalists. But even if you accept that claim, Miller’s worldview is still the Buchanan-Francis one, which holds that people from the Third World are fundamentally unfit to partake of the inheritance of Western civilization that is the U.S.
“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.”
The Myth of Civilizational Unfitness
For Miller, it all started to go wrong with the 1965 immigration act. Miller has long lamented what this law and its impacts supposedly “did” to the U.S. In 2022, Miller declared that the act’s legacy has been to destroy “social cohesion” in the country. “There cannot be social trust,” Miller continued. “There cannot be civic bonding. There cannot be a shared culture, a shared language, a shared education, a shared experience.”
But all of this is wrong. And it’s a terrible basis for U.S. immigration policy.
Miller’s own ancestors were subjected to similar claims: They, too, were deemed unfit to participate in the inheritance of Western civilization that the U.S. represented at the beginning of the 20th century. Obviously history disproved this, as does Miller’s own story. To use Miller’s own frame, this would have to mean that Southern and Eastern Europeans actually did have the cultural genus to carry on the inheritance from Greece and Rome as it was transmitted via (Northern and Western) Europe to Thomas Jefferson’s pen in Monticello and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, whereas today’s immigrants do not.
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 U.S. 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.
The Myth of a Static West
It’s sometimes argued that the 1965 act, by opening us to global immigration, shifted the country’s demographics far more than predicted. That’s true, but nonetheless, studies have shown that recent waves of immigrants have assimilated just as successfully as previous ones did, and that immigrants embrace American political institutions. Other empirical work has undermined claims that they’re dissolving our social bonds. If you’re worried about declining “social cohesion,” let’s talk about soaring economic inequality, weakening civic virtue, declining worker power, and social tensions cynically stoked and manipulated by right-wing elites—all of which Trump is exacerbating.
“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.
But immigration—including undocumented migration—spawns new forms of community and solidarity. You know who understands this perfectly well? Joe Rogan does, when he calls it “horrific” to arrest “normal, regular people that have been here for 20 years” in “front of their kids.” So do the residents of a small Missouri town when they rebel against the arrest of a 20-year resident whom they now see as a local “mom.” So do majorities of Americans when they tell pollsters that they don’t support deporting undocumented immigrants who have jobs or have been here for a number of years.
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.
It should go without saying that if immigrants were dissolving our social bonds in any sense that most normal people care about, Miller and his allies would not have to lie constantly about immigrants committing crimes, about immigrants stealing social welfare benefits, and about immigrants adopting alienating social habits like eating people’s pets.
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.
But our understanding of cosmopolitanism is itself partly an inheritance from Miller’s beloved “Western civilization.” It originated with the Stoic philosophers of the ancient world and was developed by the Roman statesman Cicero. It passed via him and others to European philosophers like Immanuel Kant, who elaborated on it further. Its conception of common humanity informed the human rights ideals that emerged after World War II, which the U.S. signed on to.
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.
A Recipe for Ruin
Ultimately, Miller’s goal of net-negative migration is itself a recipe for decline. Miller’s claim that this was responsible for our postwar successes overlooks the role of the U.S. victory in WWII combined with Europe lying in ruins, which helped enable the U.S. to establish global industrial dominance. It also overlooks the strength of unions in boosting worker power and in building the American middle class, which Trump is trying to destroy.
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.
At this point, someone will note that Biden’s policies resulted in an unusually large percentage of foreign-born residents and an out-of-control asylum system that encouraged nativist backlash, leading to Trump. That story is far too simplistic. Indeed, the ferocious public opposition to Trump’s mass deportations suggests that the “nativist backlash” is a mirage: Polls show that Americans are reaffirming their very wide support for immigration as good for the country. Some restrictionist writers have claimed to discern a broad societal backlash to the world the 1965 act made, but it just isn’t materializing.
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.”
Miller’s alternative is a horror. He has set in motion a vicious math problem: His deportation machinery is arresting people faster than they are being removed. To hold them, he’s now looking to build out a network of vast warehouses. We’re going to end up with a massively expanded immigrant carceral state at an enormous cost to all of us, both in taxpayer dollars and in the searing social conflict that Miller’s masked storm troopers have unleashed on the streets of U.S. cities.
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.
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.
This essay first appeared in The New Republic. It is republished here with permission.
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
 | A guest post by
|
Civilization, cosmopolitanism. whatever, immigration is driven by two words -- cheap employment. Human capital growth is an essential for capitalism's growth. Capitalists determine immigration and not Intellectual discourse.
Miller is of the same mold as Roy Cohen, Trump's mentor, and is equally the personification of evil.
As for Trump, he has no grounding in the democratic principles and institutions that have made our democracy great. He only knows the rough and tumble world of dirty real estate dealings ,and of ripping off creditors and business adversaries. It's not surprising that William T. Kelly, Trump's professor at Penn's prestigious Wharton School of Business and Finance, which Trump's daddy got him into from Fordham University, said: of him: "Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had".
Trump grew up like as spoiled brat and never developed an intellect or vocabulary beyond the 4th grade. He himself has made a pact with the devil-the dark far right Heritage Society, which spoon feeds him the political positions they want him to take and helps him amass the contrbutions from the billionaires who stand to gain from the policies and advocacies that the Heritage Society feeds to him. In short, the Heritage Society provides the brains; Trump provides the mouth.
Trump's biggest problem is when he has to think for himself, such as his midnight spewings and spontaneous outbursts on his Truth Social Account throughout the night, only to wake up tevery moring to have to spend the day back peddling off his spontaneously visceral outbursts which his menagerie of misfits,sycophants and court jesters have to extricate him from during the day.
He's as close as the U.S. has even come to having a totally loose and unpredictable canon in the White House. While his outbursts and antics on "The Apprentice" gained him wide popularity as a big-mouth blowhard with the brain of an eight-year old, his handlers learned how to parlay this fool into a cult leader whose entertainment value and scripted extremist positions could catapult him into the White House.
Perhaps this period in American history will become known as the time when our country lost its mind and jumped the guardrails.