The Civil Rights law that Stephen Miller says ruined America
- by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
Analysis/Opinion
In President Donald Trump’s simple and provocative language, Somali immigrants to the US, even US citizens, are “garbage.”
“Send her back!” was the chant from supporters about Rep. Ilhan Omar, the elected member of Congress, at a campaign-style event Tuesday night.
“Throw her the hell out!” Trump said.
This is a complaint about legal immigration: Trump also reminded everyone of the episode in his first term when he complained that the US was accepting immigrants from “shithole” countries.
“Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?” Trump asked the Pennsylvania crowd. “Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
Stephen Miller, the White House aide who seems to hold outsized authority over much of Trump’s agenda, in particular on immigration, expanded on these ideas on Fox News in an interview earlier Tuesday.
Both Miller and Trump have seized upon a growing pandemic relief scandal in Minnesota to disparage the entire Somali immigrant community, much of which came to the country legally beginning in the 1990s.
Pining for the pre-Civil Rights era: Miller suggested the country was better off with strict quotas that sought to preserve the racial makeup of the country in the 1920s and favored immigrants from Western and Northern Europe over what he called “third world countries.”
That period was, in Miller’s view, the “cauldron through which a unified shared national identity was formed.” He drew a line between the significant events in those 50 years of US history and negative migration. Back then, it was Swedish immigrants living in the Minneapolis neighborhood where Somalis have now settled.
A law that changed the country: The legislation was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson at the Statue of Liberty in 1965, and its goal was to prioritize the skills and abilities of legal immigrants. The previous law had demanded that the racial and cultural makeup of the country not be changed as a result of immigration.
“It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation,” Johnson said at the time.
He argued the system of quotas based on country of origin violated the founding precept of the country:
“ Men of needed skill and talent were denied entrance because they came from southern or eastern Europe or from one of the developing continents. This system violated the basic principle of American democracy — the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.”
Immigration surged, primarily from Latin America and Asia, while European immigration fell.
A key moment for Civil Rights: The historian Mark Updegrove, CEO of the LBJ Presidential Library, places the immigration law alongside the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act as key pieces of Civil Rights legislation that changed the country.
“What LBJ said is that we shouldn’t be asking people where they’re from; we should be asking people what can you do for our country,” he said. “It opened up opportunities for people who, to that point, had been banned from coming to the United States simply by virtue of their ethnicity or country of origin, which is ridiculous.”
The law also represented one of the few times Congress has come together to address immigration comprehensively.
“Third world countries”: Miller’s complaint, expressed on Fox News, is that the 1965 law attracted more people from “third world” countries who he argued have failed to assimilate in the US.
“What you saw between 1965 and today was the single largest experiment on a society, on a civilization, that had ever been conducted in human history,” Miller argued.
In his view, immigrant groups like Somali-Americans, who sought refuge in Minnesota starting in the 1990s, failed as Americans. And he said their natural-born citizen children have also failed. On natural born citizenship, the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to ignore the plain language of what’s in the Constitution.
“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful — again, Somalia is a clear example … but you see very persistent issues in every subsequent generation. You see consistent high rates of welfare use, high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
CNN’s recent reporting, on the other hand, suggests Minnesota is still welcoming to the Somali immigrants, most of them now citizens, having natural-born citizen children.
A nod to replacement theory: That’s not what Miller sees, for either Somalis or other immigrant groups. Think back to when Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants legally in the US of eating dogs in Ohio. Borrowing, at least in spirit, from the objectively racist concept of replacement theory, Miller said immigrants from “third-world” countries are going to bring the US down.
“It’s just common sense. If Somalians cannot make Somalia successful, why would we think that the track record would be any different in the United States?” he said, pointing also to immigrants from other African countries.
“If these societies all over the world continue to fail, you have to ask yourself, if you bring those societies into our country, what do you think will happen? You will replicate the conditions they left,” he said.
Immigration as the root problem of many US problems: Miller, becoming animated, pointed to education, health care, public safety and deficit spending, which is just about the waterfront of societal issues.
“If you subtract immigration out of test scores, all of a sudden our test scores skyrocket! If you subtract immigration out of health care, all of a sudden we don’t have near to the size of the health care challenges our country faces. If you subtract immigration out of public safety, all of a sudden, we don’t have violent crime in so many of our cities. Issue after issue, we talk about these things as (sic) they things just happen to us. The schools just suddenly fail. Violent crime just suddenly explodes. The deficit just suddenly skyrockets. These are a result of social policy choices that we made through immigration.”
Miller’s argument lacks evidence: I put Miller’s comments to David Bier, a critic of the Trump administration’s immigration policy at the libertarian-leaning CATO institute. Bier disagreed, to put it mildly.
“His views are baseless smears based on bias, not serious analysis,” he told me by email, adding a point-by-point deconstruction of what Miller said.
“Immigrants to the United States today are assimilating faster than prior generations. They are more likely to know English, more likely to have graduated from college, are more economically productive, and are more beneficial to government budgets than in the early 20th century. They have more experience with democracy than past waves of immigration, and they are more patriotic and more supportive of US institutions than the US-born.
“By the time they naturalize, they have adopted almost the same political views, except for immigration policy. They are less likely to commit crimes and be incarcerated than those in the early 20th century. Immigrants today cost less to the health care system than the U.S.-born. They are less likely to commit and be incarcerated for crimes than the US-born. Immigrants increase the returns to education for the US-born, leading more US-born to graduate. They make the US-born more productive, increasing their wages and living standards.”
Imprinted all over Trump’s policies: Regardless of whether his views are based in fact, Miller’s outlook is consistently repeated in Trump’s policies, which frequently conflate legal and undocumented immigrants from countries like Somalia.
Republicans cited unverified allegations of widespread fraud to cut future Medicaid and food assistance spending. Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security has indicated she will expand a travel ban from 19 countries to include “every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”
Immigration paranoia fuels a new ‘Trump corollary’: The larger issue of immigration, including legal immigration, is also behind a more existential policy shift the US announced this week in a new National Security Strategy.
The document announces a new “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine that will see the US act against Western Hemisphere countries to make sure they are able to prevent mass migration to the US.
The document also seems to refer to migrant communities like Somalis in the US when it states that US sovereignty has been eroded by “the cynical manipulation of our immigration system to build up voting blocs loyal to foreign interests within our country.”
“Civilizational erasure”: The US warns in the National Security Strategy that Europe — ancestral home of the immigrants that Trump prefers — is threatened by “civilizational erasure,” an unsubtle reference to immigration to Europe.
“Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less,” the document states, arguing that such a transformation could call into question whether European countries will remain as US allies.
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