The Quote Below: More Misinformation the Media
“Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration. It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now called Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription into the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and too his chances in America. . . .
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this century.” – Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I know Because I Am His Uncle, David Glosser, Politico 8/13/18 [Link]
Fact Check on Quote: Stephen Miller is a senior policy advisor to President Trump. He firmly believes in immigration law enforcement and the need to reduce legal immigration, now at the highest sustained level in our history. Legal immigration, averaging around 1.3 million a year, is largely driven by immigrants who bring in their relatives—who in turn bring in their relatives in an ongoing chain of migration. Miller opposes this chain migration, in part, because it allows the family connections of immigrants to set immigration policy rather than national interest.
The thrust of the quote above is that the memory of one’s immigration ancestors should be the primary guide for setting policy. The implication is that no immigrant, or descendant of an immigration, has the right to bar anyone who wants to come to America. This idea totally misunderstands the nature of a nation.
To illustrate, let’s suppose a man applies for job at a business, and the head of the hiring department turns down his application. The applicant then objects, “How can you turn me down when you were once a job applicant like me? After all nearly everyone who works for your company was once an applicant. So who can a company of job applicants turn down anyone who applies for work?”
The obvious response is that companies don’t exist to hire people. They don’t exist to hire people. They exist to sell products and make a profit. It hires people on the basis of furthering those objectives. Obviously, the company would go out of business if it hired everyone who applied.
Nations, including our nation, exist to serve the common interests of their peoples. Thus we should admit immigrants on the basis of what they can contribute to our society. We are under no moral obligation to open our doors so that the world can swamp us. That obviously would be against our national interest.
Stephen Miller is no hypocrite when he puts country ahead of family history. A word for that is patriotism. Immigration advocates commonly emote about their immigrant grandparents. They would do much better to consider what kind of America their grandchildren will inherit.