How Miller’s rise embodies anti-immigration movement
WASHINGTON — When historians try to explain how opponents of immigration captured the Republican Party, they may turn to the spring of 2007, when President George W. Bush threw his waning powers behind a legalization plan and conservative populists buried it in scorn.
Bush was so taken aback, he said he worried about America “losing its soul,” and immigration politics have never been the same.
That spring was significant for another reason, too: An intense young man with wary, hooded eyes and fiercely anti-immigrant views graduated from college and began a meteoric rise as a Republican operative. With the timing of a screenplay, the man and the moment converged.
Stephen Miller was 22 and looking for work in Washington. He lacked government experience but had media appearanc
es on talk radio and Fox News and a history of pushing causes like “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” A first-term congresswoman from Minnesota offered him a job interview and discovered they were reading the same book: a polemic warning that Muslim immigration could mean “the end of the world as we know it.”
By the end of the interview, Rep. Michele Bachmann had a new press secretary. And a dozen years later, Miller, now a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, is presiding over one of the most fervent attacks on immigration in American history.
The story of Miller’s rise has been told with a focus on his pugnacity and paradoxes. Known more for his enemies than his friends, he is a conservative firebrand from liberal Santa Monica, Calif., and a descendant of refugees who is seeking to eliminate refugee programs. He is a Duke graduate in bespoke suits who rails against the perfidy of so-called elites. Among those who have questioned his moral fitness are his uncle, his childhood rabbi and 3,400 fellow Duke alumni.
Less attention has been paid to the forces that have abetted his rise and eroded Republican support for immigration — forces Miller has personified and advanced in a career unusually reflective of its times.
Rising fears of terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks brought new calls to keep immigrants out. Declining need for industrial labor left fewer businesses clamoring to bring them in. A surge of migrants across the South stoked a backlash in the party’s geographic base.
Conservative media, once divided, turned against immigration, and immigration-reduction groups that had operated on the margins grew in numbers and sophistication. Abandoning calls for minority outreach, the Republican Party chose instead to energize its conservative white base — heeding strategists who said the immigrant vote was not just a lost cause but an existential threat.
Arriving in Washington as these forces coalesced, Miller rode the tail winds with zeal. Warning of terrorism and disturbed by multicultural change, he became the protégé of a Southern senator especially hostile to immigration, Jeff Sessions of Alabama. And he courted allies in conservative media and immigration-restriction groups.
Miller, who declined to comment for this article, affects the air of a lone wolf — guarded, strident, purposefully provocative. But he has been shaped by the movement whose ideas and lieutenants he helped install across the government as he consolidated a kind of power unusual for a presidential aide and unique in the Trump White House.
“I don’t agree with his policy on reducing legal immigration, but I’m in awe of how he’s been able to impact this one issue,” said Cesar Conda, who battled Miller on Capitol Hill as an aide to Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. “He’s got speech writing; he’s got policy; he’s got his own little congressional-relations operation; he’s got allies whom he’s helped place across the government.”
“Years ago, the restrictionist movement was a ragtag group” with no strong ties to either party, he added. Miller “embodies their rise into the GOP mainstream.”
The forces that pushed the Republican Party to the right also shaped Miller.
Born in 1985, he grew up in a post-Cold War world where the acceptance of refugees was no longer seen as part of America’s resistance to a hostile foreign power. Rapid ethnic change was shaping his world.
The son of an affluent real estate investor, he entered high school in a selfconsciously multicultural Santa Monica in 1999, just as California became a majority-minority state. At the start of his junior year, the attacks on Sept. 11 took nearly 3,000 lives.
The terrorist plot was central to his political awakening. Complaining that school officials were insufficiently patriotic, Miller won an uphill fight to make them enforce regulations requiring the Pledge of Allegiance. “Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School,” he wrote in 2002 in a local publication.
Tellingly, he took his case to talk radio, as a frequent guest on “The Larry Elder Show.” It was a pattern Miller would repeat in subsequent years: airing hyperbolic claims of liberal treachery to conservative media allies. “He loved being the provocative conservative behind liberal lines,” said Ari Rosmarin, who was editor of the school newspaper and now works on criminal justice issues at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Miller’s main issue was assimilation or what he saw as its failures. Writing in a local paper, he complained that “a number of students lacked basic English skills,” and his yearbook page quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism.” The school paper ran a parody of him railing against ethnic food and demanding white bread and “fine Virginia hams, just as the founding fathers used to enjoy on their bountiful plantations.”
Classmates were often unsure whether his provocative views were sincere or a bid for attention. “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have janitors who are paid to do it for us?” he said in a speech for student government. A video shows him flashing a self-satisfied smile as classmates jeer.
His uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, a vocal critic, dismissed the antics as “just an early adolescent desire to be noticed.”
“This talk of his philosophy seems disingenuous to me,” he said in an interview. “It’s very seductive. All the sudden, you become the darling of media big shots and you get notoriety for it at home.”
Miller now occupies a large West Wing office and has influence on virtually every element of immigration policy, from the words the president uses to the regulations he promulgates. Miller is a speechwriter, policy architect, personnel director, legislative aide, spokesman and strategist. At every step, he has pushed for the hardest line.
When Trump wavered on his pledge to abolish protections for 800,000 socalled Dreamers — people brought illegally to the United States as children — Miller urged conservative states to threaten lawsuits. Trump then canceled the protections.
When the president later mulled a deal to restore them, Miller stacked the negotiations with people who opposed the move, leading Trump to abandon compromise and rail against immigrants from “shithole countries.”
The Trump effort to curb immigration has played out amid so much chaos — judicial setbacks, congressional defeats, personnel purges, Twitter wars — that it can be hard to keep a running tally of its effect.
The attempt to revoke Dreamer protections has been blocked in court. An effort to bar travelers from certain predominantly Muslim countries was struck down twice. The promised border wall has not been built. A campaign to deter illegal immigration by separating thousands of children from their mothers was abandoned amid blistering criticism, including some from the right.
Still, Miller has left a big mark, in ways both obvious and obscure. After two highly publicized failures, he helped craft a travel ban that passed court muster. A fervent critic of refugee programs, he has helped cut annual admissions by about three-quarters since the end of the Obama administration.
Writing in Politico, his uncle, Glosser, expressed an “increasing horror” at his nephew’s hostility to refugees and noted that their ancestor, Wolf-Leib Glosser, arrived at Ellis Island after fleeing Russian pogroms. Had Miller’s policies prevailed then, he wrote, the Glossers probably “would have been murdered by the Nazis,” as most in their village were.
With less fanfare, Miller has guided a series of policy changes that critics liken to building an “invisible wall.” The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, counted more than 100 of them, noting that “most have moved forward untouched.”
The Trump administration quadrupled the number of work site investigations. It slowed the processing of temporary H-1B visas. It imposed new performance measures on immigration judges, to encourage faster deportations.
Beyond the commas and clauses of government rules, Miller and Trump are trying to change something deeper: America’s self-conception as a land of immigrants. Trump is the son of an immigrant. Two of the three women he married are immigrants. Four of his five children have an immigrant parent. Yet his immigration agency rewrote its mission statement to remove the phrase “nation of immigrants.”