Stephen Miller has been increasingly targeting the children of immigrants in the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown, according to a new report.
President Donald Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff has been a driving force in the mass deportation campaign, and the New York Times reported that Miller believes that millions of immigrants in the U.S. take more than they give, which has been refuted over and over by economic data.
“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller told Fox News this month. “Again, Somalia is a clear example here. You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
The administration is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, and Miller’s statements signal his intention to remove recent arrivals and their children without legal basis.
“He wants to unilaterally upend the idea that we are a nation where immigrants can ever become citizens with full and equal rights as native-born Americans,” said Andrea Flores, a former White House official during the Biden administration who worked on immigration matters.
Miller’s arguments also call to mind anti-migrant rhetoric from the early 20th century, when Congress imposed strict quotas to block immigrants from Asia and southern and Eastern Europe through the 1924 National Origins Act.
“Just as we saw with immigrants who arrived around the turn of the 20th century, the children of immigrants who have arrived to the United States since the 1960s consistently learn fluent English, obtain more education than their immigrant parents and achieve higher earnings, showing strong patterns of integration,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute. “Study after study has demonstrated the upward mobility of children of immigrants.”
The administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has sharpened as the birthright citizenship case makes its way to the high court, and both Miller and Trump have singled out the Somali community in Minnesota, where nearly 60 individuals from that migrant community have been convicted of fraud schemes against social services providers.
“This is the great lie of mass migration,” Miller posted on social media. “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a law professor at the University of Colorado Law School, said Miller seems to believe migrants are “forever branded by their origins, distinct and antithetical to the fabric of our community.”
“In short, he views immigration solely through the lens of cultural threat,” Gulasekaram said.
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