Stephen Miller's new bullshit about immigrants
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“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first
generation unsuccessful,” Miller claimed. “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.”
In fact, the data show just the opposite. The children and grandchildren
and great grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in
America.
In a new paper, Princeton’s Leah Boustan, Stanford’s Ran
Abramitzky, Elisa Jácome of Princeton, and Santiago Pérez of UC Davis, used
millions of father-son pairs spanning more than a century of U.S. history to
show that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than
immigrants were a century ago.
In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or
what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates
of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.
Stephen Miller’s great great grandfather, Wolf-Leib Glosser, was born in a dirt-floor shack in
the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus.
For much the same reasons my great grandparents came to
America — vicious pogroms that threatened his life — Wolf-Leib came to Ellis
Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 in his pockets. Though fluent in Polish,
Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English.
Wolf-Leib’s son, Nathan, soon followed, and they raised
enough money through peddling and toiling in sweatshops to buy passage to
America for the rest of their family, in 1906 — including young Sam Glosser, Stephen Miller’s great grandfather.
The family settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a booming coal and steel town, where they rose from peddling goods to owning a haberdashery, and then owning a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores, run by Sam, and Sam’s son, Izzy (Stephen Miller’s maternal grandfather).
Two generations later, in 1985, came little Stephen — who
developed such a visceral hate for immigrants that he makes up facts about them
that have no bearing on reality.
In a little more than eleven months, Stephen and his boss
have made sweeping changes to limit legal immigration to
America.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring that children born to
undocumented immigrants and to some temporary foreign residents would no longer
be granted citizenship automatically.
The executive order, which was paused by the courts, could
throw into doubt the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of babies born each
year. Miller and his boss want the Supreme Court to uphold that executive
order.
After the horrific shooting of two National Guard members on
August 26, by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national,
Trump halted naturalizations for people from many African and the Middle
Eastern countries.
Trump is also threatening to strip U.S. citizenship from
naturalized migrants “who undermine domestic tranquility.” He plans to deport
foreigners deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilization” and aims to
detain even more migrants in jail or in warehouses — in the U.S. or in other
countries — without due process.
In addition to the unconstitutionality of such actions, they
stir up the worst nativist and racist impulses in America — blaming and
scapegoating entire groups of people.
As they make their case to crack down on illegal and legal
immigration, Miller and Trump have targeted Minnesota’s Somali community —
seizing on an investigation into fraud that took place in pockets
of the Somali diaspora in the state, to denounce the entire community, which
Trump has called “garbage.”
Let’s be clear. Apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants
— all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came
here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands;
some came enslaved.
Almost all of us are mongrels — of mixed nationalities,
mixed ethnicities, mixed races, mixed creeds. While we maintain our own
traditions, we also embrace the ideals of this nation.
As Ronald Reagan put it in a 1988 speech,
You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. But … anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Reagan understood that America is a set of aspirations and
ideals, more than it is a nationality.
Miller and Trump want to fuel bigotry. Like dictators before
him, Trump’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them.” His entire
project depends on hate.
America is better than Trump or his chief bigot.
We won’t buy their hate. To the contrary, we’ll call out
bigots. We won’t tolerate intolerance. We’ll protect hardworking members of our
community. We’ll alert them when ICE is lurking.
We will not succumb to the ravings of a venomous president
who wants us to hate each other — or his bigoted sidekick.
