Miller’s Actions: A Meaner, and Whiter, America
In that book about Miller’s ancestors, titled A Precious Legacy, there are wrenching passages about the Immigration Act of 1924. That law, which represented the culmination of all those aforementioned virulent sentiments about Southern and Eastern Europeans, adopted an immigration formula tied to the 1890 distribution of ethnicities in the United States. This guaranteed that most of the 150,000 immigrants allowed entry each year would henceforth come from Northern and Western Europe, imposing tighter limits on those from Southern and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The law’s primary aim was to slam the breaks on immigration by people like Miller’s ancestors.
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.”
Strikingly, Stephen Miller has spoken positively about the 1924 law. “During the last period in which America was the undisputed global superpower—financially, culturally, militarily—immigration was net negative,” Miller tweeted in August. He’s referring to the period between the 1924 law and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended ethnic quotas for immigration created in 1924: In short, Miller is extolling the impacts of the 1924 measure. He was even more direct in 2015 emails to Breitbart obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He repeatedly praised President Calvin Coolidge for signing that law, describing the act rhapsodically as Coolidge’s “heritage” and suggesting the country should act “like Coolidge did”; that is, either dramatically restrict immigration or impose new ethnic quotas on it.
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.