Stephen Miller, the grandson of refugees who fled Russian xenophobia, is now the chief architect of a xenophobia policy built on the explicit premise that certain peoples are permanently unassimilable.
By his own logic, it was a mistake for his family to be allowed into the United States, and he himself should be jailed immediately. The White House deputy chief of staff is pushing the same framework that means his own family should be deported.
Not Hyperbole
It is the direct application of Miller’s stated beliefs to his own ancestry. He just laid out his ideological framework with the clarity of 1930s Nazi Germany. Speaking on Fox News about immigrants he hates the most, perhaps himself, he declared:
With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful. You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.
It would not be an exaggeration to call Stephen Miller a race-baiting extremist who more than a couple states would consider a national security threat, given the hate rhetoric he pushes. On social media, he elaborated:
This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.
Again, it is as if he is begging to repeat the history that would have led to his arrest and the arrest of his entire family. He is recreating the conditions, the terrors, of his family’s broken homeland. Who will stop him?
Earlier, Miller praised the Immigration Act of 1924, which established strict national-origin quotas designed to preserve the racial composition of the United States. He described the period following that Act as “the cauldron through which a unified shared national identity was formed.”
These are not casual remarks.
This is a coherent ideological framework that origin determines destiny. Certain peoples carry their origins with them across generations. They cannot transform. They will inevitably “recreate” what they fled.
Blut und Boden
The Nazi German phrase for Miller’s ideology is Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil).
The phrase was popularized by Richard Walther Darré, Hitler’s Minister of Food and Agriculture, in 1930s racist diatribes.
Notably, Darré was born in Argentina to a half-German mother, then headed to King’s College in London to become fluent in four languages as the cosmopolitan product of international commerce. Yet he espoused hatred of his own Christianity for its “teaching of the equality of men before God,” claiming it had “deprived the Teutonic nobility of its moral foundations.” He immigrated to Germany to champion the ideology that, by its own logic, should have excluded him and killed him.
For example, in 1933 he issued the Hereditary Farm Law, which stated only those who could prove “pure” bloodline since 1800 would be allowed to own a farm. He did this to declare an abrupt end to inflation and also to declare residents of urban areas as tainted, yet his own policies then caused food prices to spike and a mass migration to cities.
Sound familiar?
The core false premise of Darré, Hitler, and now Miller is that ethnicity is determined by descent (“blood”) and is inextricably linked to territory (“soil”).
Certain peoples are said to be anchored to certain lands. Others are then declared the foreign elements, by some random applied concept like skin color or hair style, that can never truly integrate, no matter how many generations pass.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines Miller’s adopted ideology simply:
Blood referred to the goal of a “racially pure” Aryan people. Soil invoked a mystical vision of the special relationship between the Germanic people and their land. It was also a tool to justify land seizures in eastern Europe and the forced expulsion of local populations.
The ideology is used for two purposes. First, ethnic minorities (e.g. Miller) are classified permanent outsiders who threaten national “purity”. Second, moral justification is cooked into a removal doctrine.
The Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust notes the destination for Miller, by Miller’s own words:
This definition precluded Jews from ever becoming Germans because they lacked pure blood and roots in the soil because of their Semitic origins. Using the metaphor of the parasite, the Nazis depicted the Jews as a foreign element that insidiously attacked the nation’s immune system.
Miller’s formulation is the exact pattern repeating: immigrants of “failed states” will “recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Miller is an immigrant from failed Russia recreating Russia.
No magic transformation occurs.
To him the problem is in his own blood.
The structural logic is identical.
However, Miller is gambling that he can trick people into believing the target population has changed and he is now “white” enough to be the Nazi.
Glosser Family of Antopol
Stephen Miller was born in 1985 in Santa Monica, California. His mother, Miriam, was the daughter of immigrants named Glosser.
Wolf Lieb Glotzer immigrated to New York, January 7, 1903, aboard the German ship S.S. Moltke. He fled from Antopol (today Belarus) due to state-sanctioned mass violence against his family that swept through Russia in the early 1900s. They were targeted for being outsiders in their own country.
Wolf Lieb lost everything when he fled the failing state. He lost his ability to speak the language. He lost all his money. He lost his ability to apply his skills. He even lost his name, as it was written Glosser instead.
Every metric Stephen Miller now uses to evaluate immigrants would have failed his own family, making himself a person who should be excluded from America.
The Glosser family settled into Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The sons of Wolf founded Glosser Brothers Department Store, a common role for immigrants, which became a community institution. They practiced Jewish concepts of justice and charity, despite becoming Americans. Leaving bags of groceries on the doorsteps of the needy during the Depression, long before they had achieved financial security themselves, was an example of how their imported culture helped their new country.
Stephen Miller’s grandmother, Ruth Glosser, documented his family history in a 47-page manuscript she titled “A Precious Legacy.”
The misery, fear and economic deprivation of their earlier years were forever etched into their psyche. As a result, almost from the time of their arrival in the United States, and long before they had achieved financial stability they were already “giving something back.” They had been on the receiving end of charity. And they never forgot this.
Stephen Miller Can’t Remember
Miller explicitly praises the xenophobic and hateful Immigration Act of 1924 as creating conditions for national unity.
Even surface level examination reveals that Miller apparently has long aspired to grab control of the oppressor’s grip… to commit suicide.
The 1924 Act established national-origin quotas designed to freeze the ethnic composition of the United States as it existed in 1890—before the great wave of Southern and Eastern European immigration that brought “dark skin” people like Jews, Italians, Poles, and Greeks to American shores. The explicit purpose was racial exclusion based on skin color definitions of that time.
Yes, Italians and Greeks coming to America were literally declared non-white and therefore subjected to racist discrimination.
The xenophobic law was championed by eugenicists who testified before Congress about the biological inferiority of “undesirable” groups that included Miller’s family. Representative Albert Johnson, the bill’s primary sponsor, pushed a “Nordic” racial theory of white supremacy. The House Committee on Immigration consulted extensively with the Eugenics Research Association to make America as racist as possible.
Senator David Reed, the bill’s Senate sponsor who sounded back then a lot like Elon Musk today, explained its purpose plainly: the law would preserve “the racial preponderance of the basic strain of our population” and prevent “mongrelizing”.
The law immediately plummeted Jewish immigration, which had averaged over 100,000 per year before World War I, to a tiny trickle. This meant when Hitler rose to power in Germany, on a blueprint he copied from America, when the persecution of Jews intensified, when millions desperately sought refuge from Nazism, the American door strategically and cruelly had been slammed shut.
The State Department, citing the quota system, worked overtime to prevent safety for Jews in danger. The St. Louis, carrying over 900 refugees in 1939, was denied entry and returned to Europe. Over a quarter of its passengers were murdered instead of becoming American.
This is the deadly law that Stephen Miller now openly celebrates, as if to call for a time machine that can remove himself from existence.
This bloodstained racist “cauldron” of exclusion is what he invokes as the method through which “a unified shared national identity was formed.”
Had that law been in effect when Miller’s family arrived in 1903, he would have been detained and deported or worse. Stephen Miller would not be American, or perhaps even alive.
Stephen Should Cry Uncle
Dr. David Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, has publicly repudiated his nephew. In a 2018 essay titled “Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle,” Glosser wrote:
If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.
He continued:
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.
This is not rhetorical flourish.
At Charlottesville in 2017, white nationalists marched with tiki torches chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”
They articulated death for Miller, the same ideology Miller now promotes from the White House. His Jewish ancestry exempts him from nothing. The slave who serves the master is still the slave.
Glosser understood what his nephew apparently does not:
My nephew and I must both reflect long and hard on one awful truth. If in the early 20th century the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.
More and more relatives seem willing to call out Miller’s hypocrisy.
Even Stephen Miller’s cousin is against his deportation policies she says would have stopped their family coming to US. “He’s trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from,” said Alisa Kasmer
A Parvenu Bargain
Miller is not the first privileged descendant of immigrants who seeks entrance and acceptance from anti-immigrants by demonstrating he can be the even worse bully. Hannah Arendt wrote about this phenomenon in terms of Nazis. She set the distinction between the pariah and the parvenu.
The pariah accepts outsider status and finds solidarity with other outcasts. The parvenu seeks admission to domination by proving they alone are “not like those other ones.” They become zealous enforcers of hierarchies, more extreme than those born into privilege, precisely because their position is so precarious.
History provides clear examples of how this turns out the same over and over. The Association of German National Jews (Verband nationaldeutscher Juden), founded in 1921, supported Hitler and the Nazi Party. They attacked “Eastern Jews” as unassimilable, demanded restrictions on Jewish immigration to Germany, and proclaimed their German nationalism as proof of their belonging.
The Nazis used them and dissolved them in 1935. Their leader, Max Naumann, was briefly sent to a concentration camp. Their collaboration bought them nothing but ridicule for enabling their own loss. The logic of blood and soil does make short work of useful collaborators, disposing of them quickly.
Stephen Miller’s family has been in America for over 120 years. Unlike being stuck in the past like him, they built businesses, served in the military, contributed to their communities. By every measure of assimilation, Miller’s family succeeded while he did not.
Miller’s own ideology now holds that their assimilation is impossible, while his alone somehow is complete. He claims falsely that only the other immigrants and their descendants “recreate the conditions of their broken homelands” across generations, by being the one who does exactly that.
If Miller cannot escape his Russian state-sanctioned oppressor origins, as he cynically positions himself as the most hateful and racist orator in the world, neither can anyone else. If generations of Russian-Americans carry their murderous Russian state with them forever, the Glossers are the problem and Miller has to go.
The Logic
Miller’s stated beliefs reveal his ancestors came from a “failed state” characterized by poverty, state violence, and political repression.
They arrived with nothing, unable to speak English, unable to use their skills. They were a religious and ethnic minority that faced widespread discrimination in America—”No Jews” signs in hotels and employment ads were common through the mid-20th century.
Miller’s logic is they should have “recreated the conditions” of their origin instead of becoming settled and successful. But they did not follow his logic. Instead they built businesses, educated their children, contributed to civic life, practiced charity. By every empirical measure, they integrated successfully. As did millions of other Jewish immigrants. As do immigrants from everywhere and anywhere, as extensive research demonstrates—showing that children of immigrants outperform on education and economic mobility, becoming the success of the country they enter.
But Miller is trying to use himself to prove himself right. By being a failure he is trying to argue everyone else is the failure. This ideology is fake empiricism. It is fear and hate dispensed as mysticism. Blood and soil. Origin as destiny. And by that ideology, the Miller himself is the biggest mistake—just like his Jewish ancestors of Europe were a mistake to Nazis.
Miller is clearly trying to be as “know nothing” as possible. He is a man of assumptions and shortcuts, gambling that he can exempt himself from the machinery he is building. He believes that his assumed fiction of whiteness, his assumed fiction of Christianity (by marriage), his assumed fictional position within the power structure (by appointment) all provides him protection from persecution under his own words.
He positions himself as the gatekeeper who rewrites the rules arbitrarily to say which immigrants are acceptable and which are not, to pleasure himself. Yet the Charlottesville marchers clearly had Miller in mind when they made lists of who to kill next. The ideology he tries to wrap himself in as camouflage has no escape clauses for collaborators. They are the ones seen as the most deserving of murder under Nazism because they betrayed their own. If “blood” determines destiny he only digs a closer and deeper grave for himself with every embrace of racist oppressors.
History Rebukes Miller
The Association of German National Jews thought pivoting loyalty to their threats would protect them from threats.
It did not.
The Jews of Hungary thought their integration into their threats protected them from threats. In 1944, in a matter of weeks, over 400,000 were deported to be murdered in Auschwitz.
The lesson is of course Miller will personally face consequences because the ideology he promotes will kill him. The other lesson is that the blood and soil ideology, once empowered, is far more than a threat to just Miller because it is the machinery of mass murder.
Today’s target is someone Miller says doesn’t look like him. Miller uses his hatred of non-whites to argue immigrants will “recreate the conditions of their broken homelands.”
Tomorrow’s target will be determined by similar false logic of hate for political convenience. The genocidal ideology is infinitely flexible about who constitutes the threat, because it’s little more than power to turn fear into race based genocide. It is inflexible only about the solution: exclusion, removal, and then “purification” with mass graves to dispose of the evidence.
Stephen Miller’s family fled the Russians because of the ideology that Miller recreates. His family that didn’t flee were murdered. He acts like this history is forgotten, like he can repeat the worst mistakes, and that he won’t end up in the same place that history predicts. His grandmother documented it. His uncle has publicly reminded him.
He is calling for his own deportation.
He is building the machinery of his own exclusion.
He is articulating the ideology that would have sent his family “up the crematoria chimneys.”
This is not a complicated strategy.
After Hitler committed suicide, Darré was convicted at Nuremberg and sent to jail. He drank himself to death not long after being released.
This is simple collaboration.
History is unambiguous about how collaboration ends.
“We were strangers once. And we are commanded to never forget.”
