We are all descended from immigrants unless we are Native Americans. This is even true for Stephen Miller, the White House senior policy adviser. Jennifer Mendelsohn, an author, journalist, and genealogist has researched Miller and other self-righteous, anti-immigrant advocates. She calls her work #resistancegenealogy.
When Miller says that those seeking to immigrate to America should be English-speaking, he conveniently forgets that his immigrant great-grandmother, according to a 1910 Census record, could not speak English. In fact, she was Jewish and spoke Yiddish.
When Miller insists that his ancestors were legal immigrants, he forgets, as Rob Eshman writes, that there was no “illegal” immigration at the beginning of the 20th century.
Renee Stern Steinig found the Petition for Naturalization of Nison (aka Max) Miller dated November 14, 1932, Stephen Miller’s immigrant great-grandfather. His petition was rejected on the grounds of ignorance.
On his mother’s side, Miller is a Glosser. The last name was anglicized from Glotzer. Wolf Lieb Glotzer and his wife, Bessie, arrived in New York on January 7, 1903. They had fled “dreary, scary” Antopol in Poland, which later became the Republic of Belarus. The Glossers were known as the first family of retail in Pennsylvania. A book about the family, “Long Live Glossers” by Robert Jeschonek, begins chapter 3 with these words, “Imagine living in a place where armed Cossacks ride through the streets, looking to cripple or kill you.” They fled violence in search of the American Dream. And, though much, we assume, to Stephen Miller’s embarrassment, the Glossers indulged in chain migration as other family members came to America, including Sam (Gotlieb) Glosser, Miller’s maternal great-grandfather. Does Miller even know how fortunate they were to come to America when they did? Two-thirds of the Jews, in what is now Belarus, were killed during the Holocaust.
If some people had their way, the Glossers and Millers would have never been allowed to enter the United States. The Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894, made a distinction between “old immigrants” from England, Ireland, and Germany and the “new immigrants” from Italy and Eastern Europe. The new immigrants were judged “undesirable,” since it was believed they were incapable of adopting American values. (Perhaps they were correct given the value set articulated by Miller.) To be specific, Jews were among the “undesirables.”
The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 established immigration restrictions on many, including Jews. The Immigration Act of 1924 further tightened immigration levels. In the period between 1934 and 1943, the Congress, the Roosevelt Administration, and public opinion expressed concern about the fate of Jews in Europe but consistently refused to permit large-scale immigration of Jewish refugees. According to David Wyman, “The United States and its Allies were willing to attempt almost nothing to save the Jews.”
So this is the obscenity. Stephen Miller, lucky to be an American and lucky to be alive, conveniently ignores his family’s immigration history to justify his hatred of the “wrong” kind of immigrants. Of course, earlier generations of Americans considered his ancestors, all of them, to be the wrong kind of immigrants. The anti-immigrant zealots were descended from the Know-Nothing Party that was formed in 1849. They all would have applauded Trump’s use of the word “infestation” to describe Miller’s ancestors.
Photo by Gage Skidmore, June 18, 2016, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons. wikimedia.org/ wiki/ File:Stephen_Miller_by_Gage_Skidmore.jpg