Immigrant roots

Stephen Miller would deny his own great-grandparents entry to America

Iam fascinated by Stephen Miller, who took the White House podium Wednesday to announce and ardently defend the Trump administration’s support for limitations on legal immigration.

He is the 30-year-old wunderkind adviser to Donald Trump whose job during last year’s campaign was to whip up the crowd prior to Mr.Trump taking the stage.

Mr. Miller’s powerful lines, the ones that really frothed the mob, revolved around immigration. To stoke the emotions, he repeatedly referenced the brutal murder of Kate Steinle at the hands of an illegal immigrant. “How many children are dead because of our sanctuary cities?” he asked. “Don’t ever, ever let anyone tell you that you’re not a good person because you wantto secure the border!”

And then, playing John the Baptist to Jesus, Mr. Miller would say, “I have some good news for you, folks, I have some fabulous news.” And he brings on, that’s right, Donald the Savior.

According to a long profile of Mr. Miller by Julia Ioffe in Politico, Mr. Miller is the forward face of immigration for the Trump team. His former boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, said he couldn’t think of anyone as valuable to a presidential campaign since Karl Rove. When Mr. Trump brought Mr. Miller on board, Ann Coulter, America’s blondest race-baiter, tweeted, “I’m in heaven!”

But what stopped me short in Ms. Ioffe’s report was this biographical tidbit: Stephen Miller grew up in Santa Monica, in a Jewish family.

Cue the record scratch. What? I doubted the Family Miller came over on the Mayflower, and I was positive they weren’t here to greet the boat. Could it be that this young anti-immigrant leader is the descendent of immigrants?

With the help of attorney and genealogy whiz E. Randol Schoenberg, I had my answer. On his mother’s side, Mr. Miller is a Glosser — and you could write a book on the Glossers. In fact, someone did.

For $19.99, I bought the Kindle edition of “Long Live Glosser’s” by Robert Jeschonek, a history of Pennsylvania’s first family of retail. “Imagine living in a placewhere armed Cossacks ride through the streets, looking to cripple or kill you,” Chapter 3 begins.

And so it was that Wolf Lieb Glotzer and his wife, Bessie, sought to flee “dreary, scary” Antopol, in Belarus. On Jan. 7, 1903, Wolf arrived in New York aboard a German ship with $8 in his pocket. He was eventually joined by his son, Natan, a tailor, and his brother Moses, who had escaped conscription in the czar’s army. On a visit to Uncle Moses, Natan stopped in Johnstown, Pa., and fell in love with the place. He found work as a tailor and soon bought the shop.

You know the rest. Glosser’s expanded. More family joined in, including brother Sam, and Glosser Bros. eventually grew into a chain of dozens of stores, becoming a beloved part of the community before eventually closing. And so it was: Sam Glosser begat Isadore, whose grandson is, yes, Stephen Miller.

By becoming Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant avatar, Mr. Miller demonstrates that, in America, truly anything is possible: The great-grandson of a desperate refugee can grow up to shill for the demagogue bent on keeping desperate refugees like his greatgrand father out.

But it’s different now, you say. Mr. Miller’s forebears came here legally, and Mr. Trump is not about entirely stopping legal immigration. But for Mr. Miller to say his family came to America “legally” is a ruse.

There was no illegal immigration at the turn of the 20th century, because all non-Asian immigration was essentially legal until the 1920s. And then, as now, angry voices fought to keep these immigrants out. They organized the Immigration Restriction League and tried to shut the ports to swarthy Italians and Jews.

“The floodgates are open,” wrote one anti-immigrant newspaper editor as Eastern European Jews docked in New York. “The horde of $9.60 steerage slime is being siphoned upon us from Continental mud tanks.”

Such sentiments led to the Immigration Quota Act of 1924 — which effectively ended Jewish immigration onthe eve of the Holocaust.

Mr. Miller’s nativism taps into that same, ever-present strain in the American body politic. But when an American Jew turns on immigrants, there is a whiff of head-scratching hypocrisy, if not something more clinical. It is taking the side of people who, in a historical blink of the eye, would have met your own great-grandparents at the docks with stones and spitballs.

It is taking a fixable problem — with immigration reform — and making it intractable by stoking anti-immigrant fear and hate, by calling for a ban on an entire religion, by demeaning the sons and daughters of immigrants by race — all things Mr. Miller and his boss do. The goal isn’t to fix a broken system, but to score political points off it.

So Mr. Miller will scream the name of Kate Steinle’s murderer but never mention, say, Antonio Diaz Chacon — an illegal immigrant who, in 2011, chased down and tackled a child molester who had just abducted a 6year-old girl.

Most immigrants, illegal or not, come to America to live secure, prosperous lives. Most are no different than Natan and Sam Glosser.

Thank God the anti-immigrant demagogues of 1900 didn’t get their way. The Glosser brothers would have been left to molder in some Belarusian where fate would have given them the choice of Hitler or Stalin. And Stephen Miller would never have been born.

But he was. He had the blessing of being born the great-grandson of Jewish immigrants and not the child of today’s refugees, who want only the same chance Sam Glosser once had to make themselves, and America, great.

Rob Eshman is publisher and editor-in-chief of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal, where this piece first appeared (robe@jewishjournal.com).