by Adam Serwer
What made Trump unusual was his administration’s commitment to barbarism as an end rather than a means, with few of the redeeming features that tempered other presidents’ approaches to immigration. The story of Trump’s top immigration adviser and how his family came to the United States, as poor, rural migrants seeking a better future, seemed like an ideal way to illustrate that.
NOT THE RIGHT WAY
SPRING 2021
They were not sending their best. They were sending people with lots of problems, and they were bringing those problems to the United States. They were bringing crime. They were rapists. Some, you might assume, were good people.
I’m referring, of course, to Great Britain, which historians estimate sent around 50,000 convicts to its American colonies following the 1718 Transportation Act, which allowed for the purchase of convict labor through indentured servitude. Benjamin Franklin compared the convicts unfavorably to rattlesnakes, noting that “the Rattle-Snake gives Warning before he attempts his Mischief; which the Convict does not.” In 1722, both Maryland and Virginia sought to prevent the importation of convicts from Great Britain, both of which were overruled by their colonial overseers.
For this reason, the 1931 federal Wickersham Commission report into “crime and the foreign born,” found that “the theory that immigration is responsible for crime, that the most recent ‘wave of immigration,’ whatever the nationality, is less desirable than the old ones, that all newcomers should be regarded with an attitude of suspicion, is a theory that is almost as old as the colonies planted by Englishmen on the New England coast.” In the colonies, the report notes, there was “new hope for the poor man,” and many of these migrants were “able to become useful citizens.”
The first immigration scare in America, then, predates the formation of the United States itself. The vocabulary of subsequent immigration scares would change little in the intervening centuries, except that the invention of race would provide new “scientific” justification for arguments that lacked the factual predicate of the first—after all, Britain really was sending convicts to the colonies. But just as the contributions of convicted criminals to the nation’s founding population would drift out of public memory, the descendants of those once demonized by nativism would warn that the newcomers would be the end of America, forgetting or rationalizing that the same was once said about their own ancestors.
That historical amnesia helps explain the paradox of American nativism. Immigrants come to America to find work, fleeing religious or ethnic persecution, to go to school, or to escape some other kind of turmoil. Every immigrant’s story is fundamentally unique, and yet because the vast majority of Americans come from immigrant stock, the stories of how families from across the globe became American possess unmistakably familiar parallels. But the Trump administration represents the reoccurring backlash to this sentimental story, and the ease with which some immigrants can be portrayed categorically as an invasion to be repelled by force, the familiarity of their stories obscured by the certainty that they must be unlike us.
In 1845, during the height of anti-Irish sentiment, a nativist group warned that “the United States are rapidly becoming the lazar-house and penal colony of Europe,” its jails and poorhouses emptied onto American shores “not casually, or to a trivial extent, but systematically.”
In 1866, the abolitionist champion Senator Charles Sumner would declare that he had proof from German newspapers that “men convicted of very serious crimes in Germany had been pardoned on condition that they emigrate to this country.”
In 1891, a grand jury charged with investigating the mass lynching of eleven Italians and Italian Americans in New Orleans dismissed the allegations and tried and convicted the victims and their country of origin instead. They accused the Italian government of sending its criminals to the United States, surmising that “we doubt not that the Italian government would rather be rid of them than charged with their custody and punishment,” but that “the time has passed when this country can be made a dumping ground for the worthless and depraved of every nation.”
So when Donald Trump—the descendant of an 1885 German immigrant who came to the United States penniless, illiterate in English, and reportedly fleeing a draft—announced his entry into the 2016 presidential campaign with accusations that Mexico was deliberately sending rapists and drug dealers to the United States, he was engaging in an old American tradition. That tradition is enabled by an equally important one—the collective forgetting that comes with assimilation, the insistence from the descendants of a previous generation of immigrants that their ancestors, unlike these upstart newcomers, were good and virtuous, that they came to America the Right Way.
“The concept of illegal immigration can only exist when there are restrictions on immigration,” said Mae Ngai, a professor at Columbia University and the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. “So if we have an open system, which we pretty much had for Europeans and for people from the Western Hemisphere into the early twentieth century, [if] there’s an open door anybody can more or less anyone go through, then everybody’s legal.”
The concept of illegal immigration in the United States is a relatively new one, and the massive state apparatus for expelling “illegals” younger still. The ancestors of most of the descendants of European immigrants in the United States simply never had to face it. So for most of the more than 20 million European immigrants who came to the United States between 1880 and 1920, it’s true that they immigrated “the right way.” But only because for most Europeans who came to the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, there was almost no wrong way to do it.
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In the fall of 1965, in one of the least appreciated accomplishments of the civil-rights era, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill repealing restrictions adopted at the turn of the century that had curtailed immigration on the basis of race and national identity.
“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,” Johnson declared as he signed the bill. “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.”
Those restrictions had targeted not only Africans and Asians but European Jews, Italians, Greeks, and others, considered by nativists to be “inferior” to the “native” white American stock at the time, whom the nativists saw as the mighty Anglo-Saxon descendants of Germanic chieftains. These were people immigration restrictionists believed were prone to criminality and labor radicalism, agents of malign foreign powers hoping to dispose of their miscreants in the United States. For Johnson, and for most of the lawmakers who voted for the bill, the repeal of the eugenics-inspired 1920s-era restrictions—later an inspiration to Nazi Germany—repaired “a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice,” and corrected “a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.”
But for Stephen Miller, a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Belarus, who would go on to become an architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, the bill was a tragic mistake. In 2015, as an aide to then-senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, he urged a young conservative writer named Katie McHugh to write about its “ruinous consequences,” then praised her after she published a piece lamenting the growth of the Latino population and the decline of “native born whites.” Like his predecessors at the turn of the century, Miller saw national “ruin” in the increased presence of immigrants he considered to be nonwhite.
“This is a person who believes in discredited race science and eugenics in how you craft policy to hurt people, especially people of color, especially Muslims,” McHugh told NPR in 2019.
McHugh, who at the time was part of a circle of white nationalists who were seek
ing to burrow into the federal bureaucracy in order to shape government policy, later recanted and exposed her former friends and associates—including Miller, whose emails with McHugh were published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But these revelations did nothing to dislodge Miller from his position of power in the Trump administration, seeking to shape American demography as his ideological heroes like Calvin Coolidge once had. In Trump, who once denigrated immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa as hailing from “shithole countries,” Miller found a president who saw the world as he did.
The bitterness of immigration restrictionists over the 1965 law stems in part from their success in shaping it. Democratic senator Ted Kennedy sought to reassure critics at the time that the changes would not “upset the ethnic mix of our society.” Although restrictionists now proclaim their affinity for “merit-based” immigration, preference for family members of immigrants—which today’s restrictionists derisively refer to as “chain migration”—was crafted by restrictionists as part of the 1965 bill. They believed that it would favor white immigrants and thus undermine the purpose of repealing racist quotas. There is nothing inherently wrong with tailoring immigration policy to job skills or family unification. But American nativists always favor the policy they hope will keep America as white as possible (however they define that), because that is how they conceive of the national interest.
For Miller and the Trump administration, that meant an immigration policy targeting maximum state force at the most vulnerable people seeking residency in the United States. Most infamous was the family separation policy, which was designed to deter illegal immigration by punishing the children of parents seeking a new life in America. The policy left thousands of families shattered, with the government unable to reunite many of them.
Miller also pursued the removal of temporary status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Latin American, Asian, African, and Caribbean nations, a drastic reduction in refugees, and imposed restrictions that effectively “ended asylum at the southern border” and made it easier to deport undocumented immigrants awaiting visas as victims of crimes in the United States.
With the blessing of the Supreme Court, the Trump administration instituted its travel ban, targeting mostly Muslim-majority nations (with Venezuela and North Korea tossed in for superficial deniability), and later expanded it in 2020.
The Trump White House also implemented far-broader criteria for denying green cards or temporary visas on the basis that the applicant was likely to become a “public charge,” that is, someone believed likely to “become dependent on the government for subsistence.” Although such standards have been part of American immigration policy since 1882, the Trump administration made the benchmarks so broad that, according to the Migration Policy Institute, at least “69 percent of recent green-card recipients had at least one negative factor named in the new rule.”
Asked to justify its harsh immigration policies, Trump administration officials would echo the insistence of restrictionists past that the new immigrants were simply inferior to the old ones.
“They don’t integrate well, they don’t have skills,” then–Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly told NPR in 2018. “They’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from—fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English, obviously that’s a big thing.”
We’ve heard it all before. “This was said in the 1890s,” David Roediger, the author of Working Toward Whiteness, told me. “People predicted that the racial character of the United States was about to change because of immigration. And they meant that, you know, it was changing because Poles were coming in, because Southern Italians were coming in, because Eastern European Jews were arriving, and they were the people who weren’t speaking and didn’t know how to speak English, weren’t assimilating, who were poor prospects.”
It would be a mistake to describe it as ironic that Kelly was inadvertently describing the ancestors of the most ardent restrictionists in the Trump White House. After all, the story of immigration in America is that the ramparts of immigration restrictionism are manned by those but a generation or two removed from being described as invaders. The result is a gauntlet of laws, regulations, and militarized enforcement that makes any comparison between the era of open borders for Europeans and the last half century laughable, despite the persistence of the comparison and its role in rationalizing the violence of contemporary American immigration policy.
But the story is nonetheless worth telling. Trump’s paternal grandfather came to the United States as a German-speaking teenager from a “small wine village.” Kelly’s maternal grandfather Giuseppe Pedalino was an Italian American fruit-cart peddler who reportedly “never spoke a word of English.” They came, like most European immigrants of the time, fleeing poverty or persecution.
Most dramatically, however, it was Miller’s ancestors who came to the United States fleeing religious persecution, ethnic hatred, and extreme poverty, and Miller who devoted all of his efforts to making sure that American immigration policy would punish anyone else who might do the same, echoing the same racist ideology that shut the door on people like his forebears.
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When I was a child, and I asked my father where our family came from, he told me, “It depends.” The answer was confusing but also the closest thing to correct, because our family—like those of millions of Jews in the United States—comes from one of those parts of Eastern Europe that were constantly slipping through the blood-soaked hands of invading armies and ambitious kings, leaving residents with perpetually shifting nationalities. About four hours away from the small lake village in Poland where my father’s family is from is Antopol, a small town in the Polesian marshland, with a similar history.
Once Poland, then Russia, now Southern Belarus, this is where Stephen Miller’s maternal ancestor, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled debt and murderous persecution for a new life in the United States. Living in a “thatch-roofed house” with a dirt floor, a chicken coop, and no running water, his family “eked out a living in a small stand in the town square where they sold kerosene, salt, homemade potato bread, dry goods and other small sundry items,” according to the Glosser family history, carefully documented by Ruth Glosser, Miller’s maternal grandmother.
When Wolf-Leib Glosser was born, sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, the policy of the Russian empire was to force the separation of underage Jewish children from their families and conscript them into the military, where they would be stripped of the knowledge of their own culture and faith but denied the ability to rise in rank, because of their ethnicity. The last decade of the nineteenth century in the Russian empire was part of an era in which Jewish communities lived in constant fear of pogroms, organized campaigns of ethnic cleansing and murder.
Wolf-Leib arrived in the United States in January 1903, with eight dollars to his name and speaking Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and liturgical Hebrew but no English. It was a mere three months before the Kishinev pogrom, in which Russians poured into the streets of that city on Easter weekend, slaughtering Jewish residents and destroying their shops and homes as local police looked on. The incident “sent shockwaves” throughout the United States, where few political leaders who condemned racism and bigotry in Russia publicly recognized the echoes of their nation’s own plague of mob violence against minorities.
Wolf-Leib fled in the “dead of night,” leaving his wife and children behind to placate his debtors. He spent months peddling a fruit cart in New York City while his brother Nathan worked in a sweatshop, the two of them sending money back home. Seeking more-gainful employment, Nathan went to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where he worked in a laundry–tailor shop, ultimately securing a loan from a local merchant, which would be the seed mon
ey for his own business. Wolf-Leib would join him shortly thereafter.
By 1906, Wolf-Leib and Nathan were able to send for their family in Russia, with the aid of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (now known as HIAS). Founded in 1881, the organization helped hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews flee persecution and immigrate to the United States. The Glosser family, poor, rural, lacking formal educations and the ability to speak English—all of the qualities described by John Kelly as disqualifying current migrants—had begun a thriving business and become valued members of their community. This is a common turn-of-the-century story, but it is also a common story for millions of American immigrants from Vietnam to Guatemala.
Shortly thereafter, nativists fearful of the demographic changes wrought by Jews, Italians, and others successfully choked off immigration from Russia with the restrictions of the 1920s. By 1942, the Glossers’ remaining family in Antopol had been wiped out.
“Those of our family who could not make it to the United States, who had not made the decision to leave or had not been able to come before the door was slammed shut, they couldn’t get in,” David Glosser, who provided me with his mother’s account of their family history, told me. “At the start of World War II, they were all murdered by the Nazis.”
Glosser was explicit about how the immigration restrictions championed by Wolf-Leib’s descendant, Stephen Miller, would have affected his family. “They would have been excluded. They didn’t speak English. They had no support. They were impoverished. They would not have been admitted. It’s quite clear,” Glosser said. “You and I wouldn’t be having this chat.”
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The story of the Glossers is one of vicious persecution, crushing poverty, and finally the freedom to live their lives free of the oppression that forced them to flee their ancestral home. But it is also the story of separate standards for the European immigrants of a prior era, one in which both the lack of legal restrictions and the arbitrary lines of racial identity in the United States worked to their advantage.