“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.”
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 United States. 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 Civilizational Charmed Circle Is Absurd
Let’s return to the fact that Miller’s own ancestors were subjected to similar claims: They, too, were deemed unfit to participate in the inheritance of Western civilization that the United States represented at the beginning of the twentieth 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 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.
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.