loading . . . Inside Stephen Millerâs Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State Stephen Millerâs ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903. Thatâs when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser disembarked at Ellis Island after leaving behind his hometown in Antopol, a small town in the part of the czarist Russian empire that is now Belarus. Wolf Laib, who was fleeing a life marked by anti-Jewish pogroms and forced conscription, quickly set about trying to raise more money to bring over relatives.
âWolf Laib found work in New York City peddling bananas and other fruit on street corners, and began sending small sums of money back to the family,â reads an unpublished book about the family that one of Stephen Millerâs relatives shared with _The New Republic_. The bookâwhich tells the story of some of Millerâs ancestorsâ immigration to the United States and their subsequent thriving hereâwas written by Millerâs grandmother, Ruth Glosser. Now that Miller has accumulated such extraordinary power over the future of our immigration system, itâs worth turning to this remarkable document, which weâre making available online for the first time.
As the book recounts, Wolf Laib managed to bring over more family members in 1906, including a son, Sam Glosser. Over time, Wolf LaibâMillerâs great-great-grandfatherâand his descendants built a successful haberdashery business in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which evolved into a chain of supermarkets and department stores. Sam Glosserâs American-born son, Izzy, had two American children, David and Miriam Glosserâwho were to become the uncle and mother of Stephen Miller.
This story, of course, tracks with that of countless others who arrived in the United States as part of the great migration, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, between the 1880s and the 1910s, which numbered as high as 20 million. As the book notes, they were out to âescape economic hardships and religious persecutionâ to build a âbetter life for themselves and their children.â
At the time, many Americans didnât think people like Millerâs ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race.
Yet at the time, many Americans didnât think people like Millerâs ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about raceâit was rooted in the âscientific racismâ of the day. But it also involved a somewhat different claim: that the new arrivals suffered from a âsocial degeneracyâ or âsocial inadequacyââtwo typical phrases at the timeâwhich rendered them a threat to the âcivilizationâ the United States was in the process of becoming. In this telling, as prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross declared in a 1914 broadside, these new immigrants were inferior to Americans who descended from the âpioneer breedâ whoâd given birth to the American nation. The new arrivals, Ross said, had âsubmergedâ that ancestral connection to the âpioneer breed,â setting the nation on a path to the âextinction that surely awaits it.â
âThere is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World,â declared one congressman not long after. As historian Gary Gerstle, author of the great book _American Crucible,_ noted in an email to me, many nativists at the time lamented the âcivilizational vulnerabilityâ of the United States, believing that âwhite, Christian, and western European cultureâ stretching back to âancient Greece and Romeâ represented the âsummit of human achievementâ and the core of American civilization. This was under dire threat from âgroups outside that cultureâ who were âunassimilable, with Jewish ranks full of Bolsheviks and Italian ranks full of anarchists.â
More than a century later, those diatribes about people like Millerâs ancestors are very similar to claims Miller makes today about the threat to âcivilizationâ supposedly posed by those emigrating from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. To be sure, it is not a new move to bring up Millerâs ancestry in the context of his current nativism, and many aspects of Millerâs worldview are well-known in a scattershot way: his disdain for multiculturalism, his hatred of mass migration, his affinity with white nationalists.
But in a series of tweets, interviews in right-wing media, and statements made elsewhere, Miller has outlined something more comprehensive and sinisterâan elaborate worldview that has escaped notice in the mainstream media. It centers immigrants as a threat to âcivilizationâ in terms that echo the rhetoric of those determined to exclude people like his ancestors.
That larger worldviewâand its intellectual rootsâdeserve more scrutiny. Given Millerâs extraordinary powerâhis near unfettered control over President Donald Trumpâs massive ramp-up in immigration enforcementâa deeper understanding of Millerâs views is essential. It demonstrates in a more vivid way the true extremism of his anti-immigrant projectâand why it poses a serious threat to the country and its future.
### Millerâs Actions: A Meaner, and Whiter, America
In that book about Millerâs ancestors, titled _A Â __Precious Legacy,_ Â there are wrenching passages about the Immigration Act of 1924. That law, which represented the culmination of all those aforementioned virulent sentiments about Southern and Eastern Europeans, adopted an immigration formula tied to the 1890 distribution of ethnicities in the United States. This guaranteed that most of the 150,000 immigrants allowed entry each year would henceforth come from Northern and Western Europe, imposing tighter limits on those from Southern and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The lawâs primary aim was to slam the breaks on immigration by people like Millerâs ancestors.
Thanks to the 1924 act, the book notes, âthe doors to free and open immigration here swung shut.â Fortunately, all of Wolf Laibâs immediate family made it to the United States by 1920, the book says, but many left behind did not fare well. âThose Jews who remained in Antopol were not so lucky,â ruefully recounts the book, which was first discussed in _Hatemonger _by journalist Jean Guerrero. It adds that most of those who remained in Wolf Laibâs town âwere murdered by the Nazis.â
Strikingly, Stephen Miller has spoken positively about the 1924 law. âDuring the last period in which America was the undisputed global superpowerâfinancially, culturally, militarilyâimmigration was net negative,â Miller tweeted in August. Heâs referring to the period between the 1924 law and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended ethnic quotas for immigration created in 1924: In short, Miller is extolling the impacts of the 1924 measure. He was even more direct in 2015 emails to Breitbart obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He repeatedly praised President Calvin Coolidge for signing that law, describing the act rhapsodically as Coolidgeâs âheritageâ and suggesting the country should act âlike Coolidge didâ; that is, either dramatically restrict immigration or impose new ethnic quotas on it.
None of this necessarily means Miller is unconcerned about the fate of those who met terrible ends due to their inability to immigrate. But Miller offered those quotes about that century-old law as a device to describe his present-day vision, and, in a very real sense, his true ideological project is to unmake the world the 1965 act created when it ended the ethnic quota system and opened the country to more immigration from all over the world.
Indeed, Millerâs grander aims are best understood as an effort to destroy the entire architecture of immigration and humanitarian resettlement put in place in the postâWorld War II era. The 1965 lawâs end to ethnic quotas guaranteed that, henceforth, immigration slots would be doled out on a race-neutral basis. That and subsequent measuresâwhich created the contemporary refugee and asylum systemâdrew heavily on the international human rights treaties that the United States and many countries signed on to after the war. Subsequent U.S. law has enshrined the right to seek refuge here and protections against getting sent home to face persecution or grave dangerâand a set of values that, theoretically at least, has been to some degree a bipartisan consensus for decades.
Miller is, at bottom, trying to eradicate _that_  set of obligations and valuesâto undo that larger consensus. To grasp this, you need to look at all the small things Miller is doing, which, taken together, all add up to one very big thing.
Take the administrationâs handling of white South Africans. Officials recently announced that they will accept only 7,500 refugees this fiscal yearâa dramatic reduction from 125,000 under President Joe Bidenâand, critically, it reserved a majority of those slots for white Afrikaners, who are mostly descendants of Dutch and French settlers. This implements Trumpâs 2025 executive order decreeing that they must be treated as a persecuted âethnic minority.â He says they face white âgenocide,â which has been roundly debunked by statistics and experts.
Yet the implementation of this has been corrupted, according to two former senior State Department officials who witnessed this firsthand.
Typically, such an announcement designating a group subject to persecution would be backed up by a serious State Department analysisâoften from its Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, or PRMâlaying out a substantive case detailing this persecution. But after Trumpâs executive order hit, PRM was not directed to work up any such analysis, the officials told me. âPRM was not asked for this,â one of the officials said.
Instead, word came down from State Department political appointees declaring that this had to happen simply because the order said so, the officials stated.
âWe should have a process that has integrity in determining who among the worldâs refugees are most in need of resettlement,â the second source said. âThey blew right through that.â Asked for comment, another State Department official insisted that Afrikaner ârefugeesâ meet âstatutory requirements.â
Strikingly, the administration is also reportedly mulling proposals to prioritize far-right European political actors, who are supposedly being persecuted for anti-immigrant views, for refugee status. Letâs be clear: It is now apparently U.S. policy to favor whites in the doling out of refugee admissions.
Whatâs more, the slashing of annual refugee admissions from 125,000 to 7,500 itself represents an enormous retreat on the obligations that members of both parties have long felt toward those seeking refuge here. This comes even as the worldwide refugee population has about doubled in the last decade to over 40 million. Trump and Miller have also moved to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for people here from at least eight countries, totaling over one million. That legal protection provides temporary sojourn to people fleeing some of the most horrific conditions on the planet: armed conflicts, natural and environmental disasters, large-scale civic breakdown. These are not undocumented immigrants. They are here lawfully, have work permits, and are integrating into U.S. communities. Thatâs all been cruelly wrenched out from under them.
Critically, in moving to end all these things, Miller is feverishly stamping out every single avenue for those fleeing horrific conditions to come here legally that he possibly can. Republican presidents have traditionally set refugee admissions levels much higher than Trump has in both his terms, and TPS was signed into law by a Republican president, George H.W. Bush. In functionally ending all this, Miller is breaking with a consensus that has largely been bipartisan for decades.
Miller may also be restricting legal immigration in a broader, unnoticed sense. At my request, Migration Policy Institute analyst Julia Gelatt looked at data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to determine current processing rates. She found that if you total up most applications for immigrating to the United Statesâfrom green cards to family reunification to naturalization to temporary visas and other forms of legal statusâthe number of denials is going up. Denials rose from around 274,000 during the last three months of Bidenâs 2024 term to around 324,000 from April to June of 2025, a hike of about 50,000.
While acceptances are still much higher than denials, those acceptances have been declining, Gelatt found, leading her to conclude that USCIS is âapproving fewer applications and denying more.â And as of early December, after an Afghan refugee allegedly shot two West Virginia National Guard members in Washington, Trump suspended _all_  asylum applications and _all_  immigration applications from 19 countries.
Millerâs mission of boosting deportation numbers _of necessity_ requires arresting people who are not criminals or gang membersâpeople who have jobs and have become integrated into U.S. communitiesâbecause thereâs _no other way_ to get the removals up.
Millerâs obsession with sheer _numbers_ âthe amounts of various categories of immigrants who are either in the United States or trying to get hereâborders on pathological. Take his handling of undocumented immigrants. Miller has repeatedly raged at Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for arrest numbers he deems too low. Since the summer, arrests have hovered at around 1,000 daily. But heâs demanding 3,000 arrests per day, a pace of about one million people per year. To that end, _The New York Times_  reports, the administration has already shifted thousands of federal law enforcement personnel into deportations, hampering critical efforts to combat serious crimes like child and drug trafficking. Whatâs more, ICE itself is arresting a lot of undocumented immigrants who are not dangerous criminals, diverting resources away from arresting the latter.
Hereâs the thing: Millerâs mission of boosting deportation numbers _of necessity  _requires arresting people who are not criminals or gang membersâpeople who have jobs and have become integrated into U.S. communitiesâbecause thereâs _no other way_  to get the removals up. But it makes us less safe. Miller plainly places more importance on reducing the totals of people hereâor trying to get hereâthan on removing people who pose any actual danger. He appears to be actively prioritizing shifting the ethnic mix of the country over public safety.
### The Intellectual Roots of Millerâs Ethno-Nationalism
âIf you import the Third World, you become the Third World,â Stephen Miller declared as the presidential campaign heated up in 2024, in a quote flagged by Media Matters for America. âElect Joe Biden, and America becomes the Third World.â
This is one of the single most revealing quotes Miller has ever uttered. At the core of Millerâs worldview is the idea that the immigration levels and humanitarian resettlement programs that existed under Biden posed an existential threat to American civilization, whereas those that now exist under Trump will preserve it from ruin and even outright extinction. During a Cabinet meeting in October, Miller gushed to Trump: âThis was a country on the verge of dying, and you alone saved it.â This was widely mocked, but Miller meant it quite literally.
Cull through lots of Miller quotes, and a clearer picture of this emerges. âWhy would any civilization that actually wants to preserve itself allow for any migration that is negative to the country as a whole?â Miller seethed last spring. He also pointedly asked: âDo you know what happens to a civilization that allows for the large-scale migration of people who hate it?â Miller regularly describes migration as an âinvasionâ and insists that getting rid of undocumented immigrants would free up emergency rooms, playing on longtime tropes depicting migrants as bearers of disease. During the 2024 campaign, he told a right-wing podcaster that reelecting Biden would represent âthe assisted suicide of Western civilization.â
Note that Miller treats it as self-evident that most immigrants to the United States are either ânegative to the countryâ or âhateâ it. You see, itâs _where  _these immigrants are coming from that determines whether they pose this existential, civilizational threat. As Miller himself put it: _Import the Third World, and you become the Third World._
When I asked Steve Bannon, a longtime Miller ally, which writers most influenced Millerâs view that migration threatens American or Western âcivilization,â he texted me some names. The top three were Pat Buchanan, Samuel Huntington, and Oswald Spengler. I was unable to confirm from Miller himself whether heâs read these three authors. However, Miller plainly draws sustenance from a strain of right-wing thought that loosely includes those writers, as well as David Horowitz, who mentored Miller as he came of age politically in a diversifying high school in Santa Monica.
This strain holds roughly that âWestern civilizationâ is something like a static cultural inheritance forever teetering on the edge of plunging into terminal decline. Thatâs usually due to standard maladiesâglobalization, mass Third World migration, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism, which emphasizes our common humanity across bordersâthat threaten civilizationâs dissolution or obliteration. Americaâs status as an inheritor of the best of âWestern civilizationâ is perpetually on the brink of annihilation.
Conservative writers, to be sure, have long depicted the West as under siege, but in the hands of Buchanan and others like him, this took a more explicitly ethno-nationalist turn. As John Ganz explains in his excellent book, _When the Clock Broke,_ Buchananism more directly draws inspiration from figures like former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke and white nationalist Sam Francis, and in this sense is a precursor to Trumpâand, by extension, Miller.
The similarities between Millerâs language and that of Buchananâand others writing in a similar veinâare obvious. Buchanan wrote a 2011 book called _Suicide of a Superpower._  In a companion column, Buchanan declared that âWestern civilizationâ probably wonât âsurvive the passing of the European peoples whose ancestors created it and their replacement by Third World immigrants.â Buchanan lamented the coming extinction of the âwhite raceâ and âEuropean peoplesâ whose ancestors are credited with creating the âcivilization that came out of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and London.â If the white race passes, civilization disappears with it.
Now compare that with Millerâs twin claims that if you âimport the Third World, you become the Third World,â and that electing Biden would represent the âassisted suicide of Western civilization.â The United States is steward and inheritor of this disappearing civilization: Miller recently declared that âour legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,â and is under threat from assorted âenemiesâ who want to keep us in âdarkness.â Among those enemies hell-bent on dragging us back into civilizational darkness are immigrants from the Third World and their globalist allies. In those emails to Breitbart, Miller made this clear. After Pope Francis declared in 2015 that the United States should be more open to immigrants who âtravel northââfrom Latin AmericaâMiller drew parallels to _The Camp of the Saints,_  the 1973 Jean Raspail novel, beloved by white nationalists, that depicts the West as under siege by teeming masses of Third World immigrants, who are depicted in virulently racist terms.
In Millerâs formulations relative to Buchananâs, all thatâs missing is the word âwhite.â To be sure, Miller has adamantly denied ties to explicit white nationalists. But even if you accept that claim, Millerâs worldview is still the Buchanan-Francis one, which holds that people from the Third World are fundamentally unfit to partake of the inheritance of Western civilization that is the United States.
âThe basic idea is that if you donât come from a cultural background that comes from a traditional Western perspectiveâideally Anglo-Saxonâthen you arenât equipped for and properly formed for freedom,â 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, âcivilization is impossible.â
For Miller, it all started to go wrong with the 1965 immigration act. Miller has long lamented what this law and its impacts supposedly âdidâ to the United States. In 2022, Miller declared that the actâs legacy has been to destroy âsocial cohesionâ in the country. âThere cannot be social trust,â Miller continued. âThere cannot be civic bonding. There cannot be a shared culture, a shared language, a shared education, a shared experience.â
But all of this is wrong. And itâs a terrible basis for U.S. immigration policy.
### Millerâs Civilizational Charmed Circle Is Absurd
Letâs return to the fact that Millerâs 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 Millerâs own story. To use Millerâs 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 Jeffersonâs pen in Monticello and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, whereas todayâs immigrants do not.
Defenders of Miller might insist this assimilation happened because of post-1920s restrictionism, but the argument at the time was that theyâa âtheyâ that included his own forebears, rememberâ _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 âcivilization,â which turns out not to be a static thing. Miller has in essence shifted the civilizational goalposts: If Southern and Eastern Europeans didnât 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.
Itâs sometimes argued that the 1965 act, by opening us to global immigration, shifted the countryâs demographics far more than predicted. Thatâs 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 theyâre dissolving our social bonds. If youâre worried about declining âsocial cohesion,â letâs talk about soaring economic inequality, weakening civic virtue, declining worker power, and social tensions cynically stoked and manipulated by right-wing elitesâall of which Trump is exacerbating.
### Miller Is Wrong About âSocial Trustâ
âYou cannot have migration without consent,â Miller insists. âThat is a fundamental principle of having a civilization.â The second that undocumented immigrants settle in our communities, our social contract instantly dissolves, and our civilizational epoxy has come apart.
But immigrationâincluding undocumented migrationâspawns new forms of community and solidarity. You know who understands this perfectly well? Joe Rogan does, when he calls it âhorrificâ to arrest ânormal, regular people that have been here for 20 yearsâ in âfront of their kids.â So do the residents of a small Missouri town when they rebel against the arrest of a 20-year resident whom they now see as a local âmom.â So do majorities of Americans when they tell pollsters that they donât support deporting undocumented immigrants who have jobs or have been here for a number of years.
In saying these things, Rogan and all these others are articulating a deeper idea: As time passes and outsiders contribute toâand associate withâlocal communities, their original illegal entry loses significance, and they develop a claim to belonging. We recognize this because we see them as _human,_  and human life is messy and complicated. Most people understand this intuitively: Communities are dynamic things; their boundaries are not fixed and rigid and unchanging. Polities can decide collectively to grant amnesty to people who didnât enter perfectly by the book but have since demonstrated good intentions after a democratically determined amount of time has passed. And they are often made stronger by it.
It should go without saying that if immigrants were dissolving our social bonds in any sense that most normal people care about, Miller and his allies would not have to lie constantly about immigrants committing crimes, about immigrants stealing social welfare benefits, and about immigrants adopting alienating social habits like eating peopleâs pets.
### Miller Is Wrong About Cosmopolitanism
Miller has long harbored particular venom for âcosmopolitanism.â He draws heavily on a tradition on the far right that treats cosmopolitanism as a threat to a model of Western civilization constructed upon the building blocks of ancient nations whose _volkish_  identities stretch deep into the mists of the past.
But our understanding of cosmopolitanism is itself partly an inheritance from Millerâs beloved âWestern civilization.â It originated with the Stoic philosophers of the ancient world and was developed by the Roman statesman Cicero. It passed via him and others to European philosophers like Immanuel Kant, who elaborated on it further. Its conception of common humanity informed the human rights ideals that emerged after World War II, which the United States signed on to.
In short, there are plenty of resources in our âWestern inheritanceâ that run directly counter to, and are far more admirable than, Millerâs ideology of ethno-nationalist self-preservation. The 1965 immigration act that Miller hates so muchâby ending the idea that some ethnicities are more âfitâ to be American than othersâitself carried forward some of those âWesternâ inheritances.
### Miller Is Wrong to Want Net-Negative Migration
Ultimately, Millerâs goal of net-negative migration is itself a recipe for decline. Millerâs claim that this was responsible for our postwar successes overlooks the role of the U.S. victory in World War II combined with Europe lying in ruins, which helped enable the United States to establish global industrial dominance. It also overlooks the strength of unions in boosting worker power and in building the American middle class, which Trump is trying to destroy.
Whatâs more, demographers like William H. Frey have gamed out what a scenario of net-negative migration will look like over time, and itâs not pretty. It results in population decline, a dangerously aging workforce, and depleted tax revenues to pay for social insurance for our aging population.
At this point, someone will note that Bidenâs policies resulted in an unusually large percentage of foreign-born residents and an out-of-control asylum system that encouraged nativist backlash, leading to Trump. That story is far too simplistic. Indeed, the ferocious public opposition to Trumpâs mass deportations suggests that the ânativist backlashâ is a mirage: Polls show that Americans are reaffirming their very wide support for immigration as good for the country. Some restrictionist writers have claimed to discern a broad societal backlash to the world the 1965 act made, but it just isnât materializing.
That asideâeven if the politics of the issue are brutal and we liberals havenât solved that conundrumâthe answer is not to throw immigration into reverse. As Jordan Weissmann puts it, âThe fact that it is hard does not take away from one fundamental point: There is no real plan for economic stability or for a generous welfare state without more immigration. Full stop. Period.â
Millerâs alternative is a horror. He has set in motion a vicious math problem: His deportation machinery is arresting people faster than they are being removed. To hold them, heâs now looking to build out a network of vast warehouses. Weâre going to end up with a massively expanded immigrant carceral state at an enormous cost to all of us, both in taxpayer dollars and in the searing social conflict that Millerâs masked storm troopers have unleashed on the streets of U.S. cities.
We need more immigrants, and there absolutely are ways to limit asylum and end the systemâs failures while opening up more channels for orderly legal migration and for those here illegally to get right with the law. Millerâs project is to persuade you that immigration cannot be managed in the national interest. It can, and itâs on us to show how. Because at the end of the day, Miller is trying to restore ethnic engineering to the center of immigration policy. In so doing, heâs denying to millions the blessings that his ancestors and he himself have been so fortunate to enjoy.
On this point, weâre giving the last word to Millerâs cousin on his fatherâs side, Alisa Kasmer. Over the summer, Kasmer posted a scalding Facebook takedown of Miller that made big news. She refused all subsequent interview requests. But she agreed to talk to me for this piece.
âWeâre Jewishâwe grew up knowing how hated we were just for existing,â Kasmer told me. âNow heâs trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from: that ability to create a life for themselves, to prosper, to build community, to have successful businessesâto live a rewarding life.â Thisânot âsavingâ our âdyingâ country, as Miller absurdly claims Trump is doingâwill be Millerâs ugly legacy. https://newrepublic.com/article/204191/stephen-miller-maga-terror-state-dark-plot