How Stephen Miller Seized the Moment to Battle Immigration B.docx

How Stephen Miller Seized the Moment to Battle Immigration
By Jason DeParle
The New York Times
August 27, 2019
WASHINGTON—When historians try to explain how opponents
of immigration
captured the Republican Party, they may turn to the spring of
2007, when George W.
Bush threw his waning powers behind a legalization plan and
conservative populists
buried it in scorn.
Mr. 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 appearances 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 cold mean
“the end of the world as
we know it.”
By the end of the interview, Representative Michele Bachmann
had a new press
secretary. And a dozen years later, Mr. Miller, now a senior
adviser to President Trump,
is presiding over one of the most fervent attacks on immigration
in American history.
The story of Mr. 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 Mr. 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
2
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, Mr. Miller
rode the tailwinds with zeal
and skill. 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 the conservative media and
immigration-restriction
groups.
Mr. 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 Mr. Miller on Capitol
Hill as an aide to Senator 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. Mr. Miller “embodies their rise into the G.O.P.
mainstream.”
Country and Party in Motion
The story that has defined Mr. Miller’s life began two decades
before his birth, when
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a 1965 law ending quotas
that chose immigrants
based on their national origin and heavily favored white people
from Northern Europe.
Although Mr. Johnson called the new law a largely symbolic
measure that would neither
increase immigrants’ numbers nor alter their ethnic mix, it did
both on a vast scale —
raising the foreign-born share of the population to near-record
highs and setting the
United States on course for non-Hispanic whites to become a
minority of the
population.
Opposition initially came from the left, especially from
environmentalists worried about
population growth.
The first major immigration-control group, the Federation for

American Immigration
Reform, or FAIR, was founded in 1979 by Dr. John Tanton, a
Michigan ophthalmologist
and Sierra Club member, with funding from Cordelia Scaife
May, an heiress to the
Mellon banking fortune. Mindful of the bigotry in earlier anti-
immigration movements,
Dr. Tanton vowed to keep it “centrist/liberal in political
orientation.”
But his arguments about environmental harm and wage
competition found little
traction in a Democratic Party eager to court minorities. By the
mid-1980s, Dr. Tanton
was making the racial arguments he had pledged to avoid,
decrying the “Latin
onslaught” and insisting on the need for “a European-American
majority, and a clear
one at that.”
3
At the time, the Republican Party was divided on immigration.
While cultural
conservatives were wary of rapid demographic change,
businesses wanted cheap labor
and Cold Warriors embraced anti-Communist refugees,
including large waves of Cubans
and Vietnamese. Running for president, a conservative as
definitional as Ronald Reagan
hailed “millions of immigrants from every corner of the earth”
as a sign that God had
made America a “city on a hill.”

But by the 1990s, the Cold War had ended, and globalization
was sending
manufacturing abroad. The business wing of the Republican
Party, its main pro-
immigrant faction, had less need for foreign workers. “It’s not
that the business lobby
became anti-immigration; it’s just that they cared a lot less,”
said Margaret Peters, a
political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Not least among the forces shaping the debate was immigration
itself: It accelerated and
spread to the South, with the number of unauthorized
immigrants growing especially
fast.
In 1986, President Reagan signed a compromise law that gave
legal status to nearly
three million people while adding new penalties to curb flows
of illegal immigrants. But
enforcement proved weak, and the unauthorized population
reached a record 12 million.
Restrictionists, feeling betrayed, swore never to allow another
“amnesty.”
After a Republican backlash in the 1990s led more immigrants
to vote for Democrats,
Mr. Bush ran in 2000 as a pro-immigrant conservative. He saw
Latinos as proto-
Republican — religious, entrepreneurial, family-oriented — and
was considering a
legalization plan when the Sept. 11 attacks consumed his
administration.
By the time he returned to the issue in 2007, his party’s
skepticism toward legalization

had hardened into implacable opposition. Amplified by talk
radio, populist critics
denounced his plan as “shamnesty”; one called it an effort to
make America a “roach
motel.” Three-quarters of Republican senators opposed it.
Just a year before, a rising Republican star had urged fellow
conservatives not to
abandon the party’s Reaganite support for immigration.
“We are either going to prove that we believe in the ideas
enshrined on the Statue of
Liberty, or the American people will go looking elsewhere,”
said a congressman from
Indiana, Mike Pence.
But the party’s shift proved decisive. Now, as vice president,
Mr. Pence loyally defends
the policies set by the president and Mr. Miller.
Early Provocations
The forces that pushed the Republican Party to the right also
shaped Mr. Miller.
4
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 self-consciously

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, Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
Mr. 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.”
Some of Mr. Miller’s Latino classmates say his comments made
them feel personally
attacked. In an interview, Jason Islas said Mr. Miller told him
he was ending their
friendship for reasons that included “my Latino heritage.” He
added, “I think he is a
racist.”
But with prominent allies like David Horowitz, a conservative
author and organizer, Mr.
Miller headed to Duke in 2003 with the beginnings of a national
reputation.

5
The defining issue of Mr. Miller’s college career was the arrest,
when he was a junior, of
three white lacrosse players accused of raping a black stripper.
Mr. Miller leaped to the
players’ defense, charging that administrators and faculty
members saw them as
emblems of white privilege and simply assumed they were
guilty — a case he made on
the Fox News show “The O’Reilly Factor,” then the most-
watched cable news program.
He demanded that the school president be fired and the
prosecutor jailed.
The case collapsed. North Carolina’s attorney general declared
the players innocent, the
prosecutor was disbarred for misconduct and the accuser was
later convicted of
murdering her boyfriend. For Mr. Miller, it was a two-part
vindication — reinforcing his
conviction that liberal dogma about racial oppression was wrong
and that his scorched-
earth tactics were effective.
In his last column for the Duke Chronicle before graduating, he
called himself “a deeply
committed conservative who considers it his responsibility to do
battle with the left.”
Then he headed for Washington.
Taking the Fight to Congress
Most of Mr. Miller’s work for Mrs. Bachmann was unrelated to
immigration. He wrote
news releases about gas prices and fire department grants. But
in February 2008, soon

after he began the job, an undocumented immigrant in rural
Minnesota, Olga Franco,
drove through a stop sign and killed four children. Mrs.
Bachmann appeared on “The
O’Reilly Factor,” where she framed the issue as “anarchy versus
the rule of law.”
Although Ms. Franco was convicted of vehicular homicide, the
National Academy of
Sciences, a group founded to convey academic consensus, has
written that immigrants
are “much less likely than natives to commit crimes,” and recent
evidence suggests that
the undocumented are no exception.
But immigrant crime would be a running theme in Mr. Miller’s
career, and his emphasis
on the issue borrowed from the broader restrictionist movement.
To erode public
support for immigration, FAIR maintains an online archive of
“serious crimes by illegal
aliens.”
In a 2008 congressional campaign debate, Mrs. Bachmann’s
opponent accused her of
exploiting the tragedy, but she argued that unauthorized
immigrants were “bringing in
diseases, bringing in drugs, bringing in violence” — language
nearly identical to what
Mr. Trump would later employ with Mr. Miller as his aide —
and she mustered a slender
win.
Soon after that election, Mr. Miller went to work for
Representative John Shadegg of
Arizona, and then quickly crossed the Capitol to work for Mr.

Sessions. Perhaps the
leading immigration foe in the Senate, Mr. Sessions was a
product of a region where
immigration had soared, largely in places unaccustomed to it. In
two decades, the
number of immigrants had grown fourfold in Alabama,
Kentucky and South Carolina;
fivefold in Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee; and sixfold in
North Carolina.
6
Mr. Miller had opposed immigration mostly on cultural grounds,
warning that
newcomers were failing to learn English and endangering public
safety. But Mr.
Sessions emphasized economic concerns and what he called “the
real needs of working
Americans,” saying foreigners threatened their jobs and wages.
As a defender of the working class, Mr. Miller had uncertain
credentials. If his high
school gibe about janitors was a joke, he returned to the issue at
Duke. He mocked a
campaign to have students thank their dorm-cleaning staff,
arguing that employment
was thanks enough. “The janitors need a job, which we
provide,” he wrote.
Striking a self-consciously elitist pose, he ridiculed calls for
improved relations with
working-class Durham, N.C. (“one of the last spots in America
anyone would visit”) and
asked for a student smoking lounge with “plenty of mahogany

and leather.”
The impact of immigrants on jobs and wages is much debated —
they take jobs but make
jobs, too. Most economists see greater downward pressure on
wages coming from other
forces, including the decline of the minimum wage (adjusted for
inflation), weak unions,
outsourcing and technological change.
The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2017 that
immigration’s overall effect
on wages was “very small,” but added that “some studies have
found sizable negative
short-run impacts for high school dropouts” (who account for
about 8 percent of the
work force). Even among dropouts, some economists find the
effects modest or
nonexistent.
One prominent scholar, the Harvard economist George Borjas,
consistently finds
negative impacts much larger than his peers do. He is the figure
Mr. Miller most often
cites.
A Sign of Things to Come
In moving to Mr. Sessions’s Senate suite, Mr. Miller arrived at
a crossroads for the
restrictionist movement’s people and ideas.
As head of communications, Mr. Miller acquired a deep
knowledge of the movement’s
players and policy goals. Others in the office would also go on
to influential jobs in the
Trump administration, not least Mr. Sessions himself, who as

attorney general presided
over a policy that separated thousands of young immigrant
children from parents
illegally crossing the border.
Mr. Miller’s minor moment of Capitol Hill renown stems from
his efforts to defeat the
so-called Gang of Eight bill, a bipartisan attempt to pair new
enforcement measures
with legalization for most of the country’s 11 million
undocumented immigrants, and to
offer them a long path to citizenship.
He opposed the bill with the same zeal that had inspired high
school parodies,
haranguing reporters into the night and earning a gadfly
reputation.
7
In retrospect, three elements of Mr. Miller’s approach
foreshadowed his future exercise
of power. One was his rejection of the view that Republicans
needed to court minorities.
The Gang of Eight bill was born after the 2012 presidential
race, in which the defeated
Republican, Mitt Romney, lost the Latino vote by 44 points.
No less a hard-liner than the Fox News host Sean Hannity called
for legalizing most of
the country’s undocumented immigrants. “Pathway to
citizenship — done,” he said on
his radio show. The Republican National Committee urged the
party “to empower and
support ethnic minorities” and “champion comprehensive

immigration reform,”
meaning legalization.
Mr. Miller took the opposite view, which the party ultimately
followed: Mobilize the
white working-class base, among whom turnout had fallen.
While Mr. Bush had seen Latinos as natural Republicans, most
restrictionists saw them
as an electoral threat. “If four out of five Latinos are registering
with the Democrats,
perhaps less immigration would be in the interest of the
Republican Party, no?” wrote
Jon Feere of the Center for Immigration Studies, a spinoff of
FAIR. (Mr. Feere later
joined the Trump administration as an immigration adviser. )
A second feature of Mr. Miller’s efforts was his symbiotic
relationship with conservative
media, especially online publications like Breitbart News.
Lacking gatekeepers, the internet was a medium tailor-made for
anti-establishment
causes. Right-wing populism had long flourished on talk radio,
but Breitbart, with few
restrictions on space, could cover the issue in greater depth,
bringing intense scrutiny to
hot-button issues. And social media made articles easy to share.
Breitbart ran three stories making the false charge, circulated by
Mr. Sessions’s staff,
that the bill offered undocumented immigrants free cellphones.
Mr. Miller and Breitbart worked together closely.
“Sessions: Special Interest, Extremist Groups Wrote

Immigration Bill,” claimed one
Breitbart headline.
“Sessions: ‘Tide is Beginning to Turn’ Against Immigration
Bill,” announced another.
A third element of Mr. Miller’s work involved his alliance with
outside groups, especially
three that Dr. Tanton helped create and that received millions of
dollars from Mrs.
May’s foundation. (Over a recent 12-year period alone, the
foundation gave the Center
for Immigration Studies $17.6 million, FAIR $56.7 million and
NumbersUSA $58.2
million.)
Once a lonely cause, restrictionism had grown into a mature
movement — an
intellectual ecosystem of sorts — with groups specializing in
areas as diverse as litigation
and voter mobilization.
8
When Mr. Sessions claimed on a conference call that the Gang
of Eight bill threatened
jobs, an analyst from the Center for Immigration Studies was on
the line to vouch for the
data, and Breitbart covered it as news. When the center
presented its journalism award,
Mr. Miller was the speaker, and his first-name references to the
Center’s staff — “all the
great work that Mark and Jessica and Steve are doing”— made
it clear that he felt

among friends.
Despite Mr. Sessions’s opposition, the bill passed in the
Democratic Senate in 2013. As
it headed to the Republican House, Mr. Miller drafted a 30-page
memo that Mr.
Sessions shared with the House Republican caucus, urging
members to oppose the bill
on behalf of “millions of struggling American workers.”
House leaders were mulling how to proceed when, in June 2014,
an obscure Virginia
professor toppled the majority leader, Eric Cantor, in a
Republican primary. Though
vastly outspent, the newcomer, Dave Brat, prevailed in large
part by attacking Mr.
Cantor for being “in cahoots” with Democrats on immigration.
“The world just changed,” Mr. Miller exulted the next day.
Indeed, it had. Among those commenting in Breitbart was the
“conservative
provocateur” Donald J. Trump, who said the upset showed that
the Republican
establishment was at risk. “Everybody is now vulnerable,” he
said.
Circulating the article, Mr. Miller told friends that he wished
Mr. Trump would run for
president. When Mr. Trump did — demanding a wall and a ban
on Muslims entering the
country — Mr. Miller soon signed on.
The Right Kind of Candidate
Mr. Miller rose quickly on the small staff. A prolific writer and
combative surrogate, he

was the person most knowledgeable about the campaign’s
central issue, and he lavished
Mr. Trump with praise. (The Trump candidacy, Mr. Miller said,
had altered “Western
civilization.”) He also served as an ideological chaperone to a
candidate given to sudden
reversals of signature policies, a role Mr. Miller continues to
play in the White House.
Mr. Trump scored a coup by winning the support of some tech
workers who, after being
laid off by the Walt Disney Company, were forced to train
foreign replacements
admitted on temporary H-1B visas.
The workers embodied Mr. Trump’s larger argument that
immigration hurt American
employment. Yet days after appearing with them at a rally, Mr.
Trump said in a televised
debate that he would drop his plan to restrict the H-1B program.
“I’m changing, I’m changing,” he told the stunned interviewer.
“I’m softening the
position because we have to have talented people in this
country.”
Within hours, Mr. Trump reversed himself again, issuing a
statement to assure his
followers that he planned to “end forever the use of H-1B as a
cheap labor program.”
9
Despite the president’s public image as an unrelenting

immigration foe, some
restrictionist leaders view him as soft — a businessman whose
desire for labor will lead
him to support more immigration. That unreliability, they say,
makes Mr. Miller’s
presence especially important.
“If he weren’t there, I’m pretty sure it’d be worse,” said Mark
Krikorian, director of the
Center for Immigration Studies.
To Remake America’s Self-Image
Mr. 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. Mr. Miller is a speechwriter, policy architect,
personnel director,
legislative aide, spokesman and strategist. At every step, he has
pushed for the hardest
line.
When Mr. Trump wavered on his pledge to abolish protections
for 800,000 so-called
Dreamers — people brought illegally to the United States as
children — Mr. Miller urged
conservative states to threaten lawsuits. Mr. Trump then
canceled the protections.
When the president later mulled a deal to restore them, Mr.
Miller stacked the
negotiations with people who opposed the move, leading Mr.
Trump to abandon
compromise and rail against immigrants from “shithole
countries.”

“As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating
immigration, we are going
nowhere,” complained Senator Lindsey Graham, a South
Carolina Republican who
supported a deal.
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 impact.
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, Mr. 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, Dr. 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 Mr. Miller’s
policies prevailed then,

he wrote, the Glossers probably “would have been murdered by
the Nazis,” as most in
their village were.
10
With less fanfare, Mr. 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.
Though Mr. Miller was often the driving force, many of these
changes were longstanding
goals of the restrictionist movement. “He comes from a
community of people who’ve
been working on this, some of them, since the ’90s,” said Roy
Beck, the president of
NumbersUSA.
Beyond the commas and clauses of government rules, Mr.
Miller and Mr. Trump are
trying to change something deeper: America’s self-conception
as a land of immigrants.
Mr. 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.”
Mr. Miller even took to the White House briefing room to offer
a revisionist view of the
Statue of Liberty. Like many in his movement, he argued it
should not be seen as
welcoming immigrants because it was originally built for a
different purpose (to
celebrate political freedom) and that the Emma Lazarus poem
hailing the “huddled
masses” carries little meaning because it was added later.
The border wars intensified this spring as large numbers of
Central American families
sought asylum and Mr. Trump, with Mr. Miller urging him on,
purged top officials from
the Homeland Security Department, including the secretary,
Kirstjen Nielsen; he argued
they weren’t doing enough to keep them out.
But a quieter bureaucratic story may have revealed as much
about Mr. Miller’s priorities
and bureaucratic skill.
After long deliberation, the administration last week released a
217-page rule making it
easier to deny admission or permanent residency to low-income
immigrants deemed
likely to receive public benefits. Unlike the border disputes,
this so-called public charge
rule affects only legal immigrants, since the unauthorized are
already barred from most
safety-net programs.

Critics say the rule is already causing needy immigrants to
forgo health care and
nutritional aid. They call it a backdoor way of circumventing
Congress and creating a
new immigration system that admits fewer people, excludes the
“huddled masses,” and
favors Europeans over poorer Mexican and Central Americans.
11
Mr. Miller was so eager to see the rule enacted, he helped push
out a one-time ally, L.
Francis Cissna, the head of United States Citizenship and
Immigration Services, for not
moving fast enough.
Mr. Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies argued that
the rule would have
only modest effects on immigrant numbers but praised Mr.
Miller for asserting a
principle. “The point of immigration policy is to benefit
Americans,” he said, not “strain
the social safety net.”
While the restrictionist movement had long taken that principle
to heart, he said
“Stephen understood how to operationalize it.”

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