STEPHEN MILLER’S VIEWS ARE AS UN-AMERICAN AS IT GETS

WH deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media yesterday: “Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.” He reads like a classic example of antebellum white nationalists from our own past history. You can work for us. But you can’t be us. Let’s revisit Stephen Miller and chain migration. His family story began in Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. His family experienced violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army. The patriarch of the family, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America. The Glossers came to the US just a few years before the “America first” nativists of the day closed borders to Jewish refugees. Had Miller’s family waited any longer they would have been murdered by the Nazis. Along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. And we know Miller is not the only family with a migration story in the Trump administration. Trump's grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the run from military conscription to a new life in the US. His mother fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City. Trump’s in-laws became citizens on the strength of his own wife’s citizenship. And Melania first came to the U.S. in 1996 on a B1/B2 visitor visa for modeling work, initially without a work authorization. She met Donald Trump in 1998. In 2000, she applied for and received an employment-based EB-1 “Einstein Visa", sponsored by a modeling agency. This visa is for individuals with extraordinary ability, such as Nobel laureates, Olympic medalists, or top-tier executives. But like most things, getting such a visa is as much about getting testimonials from someone who is extraordinary in their own right and has some name recognition. Maybe from Donald Trump? And his powerful friends? The Trumps married in 2005. She became a US citizen in 2006. All of this is to point out the hypocrisy of leadership whose own histories illustrate the dream of America that they now want to slam the doors on for others. But we take heart here in Texas. While one of my Texas senators is bombarding us with anti-Muslim propaganda in a desperate attempt to ignite prejudice and hatred for our neighbors to keep his DC job, voters last night flipped a seat in the Texas Senate from Republican to Democratic in a special election. Democrat Taylor Rehmet defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a seat that Republicans have held since the early 1990s. Both Texas governor Greg Abbott and Trump publicly supported Wambsganss. And yet, voters flipped a district that Trump won in 2024 by 17 points to Rehmet, electing him by a 14.4-point margin. Take out the minor-party candidates in the vote, the swing from the Republican in 2024 was 32 points toward the Democrats. In Texas.