Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State

Stephen Miller’s ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903. That’s when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser disembarked at Ellis Island after leaving behind his hometown in Antopol , a small town in the part of the czarist Russian empire that is now Belarus. Wolf Laib, who was fleeing a life marked by anti-Jewish pogroms and forced conscription, quickly set about trying to raise more money to bring over relatives. “Wolf Laib found work in New York City peddling bananas and other fruit on street corners, and began sending small sums of money back to the family,” reads an unpublished book about the family that one of Stephen Miller’s relatives shared with The New Republic . The book-which tells the story of some of Miller’s ancestors’ immigration to the United States and their subsequent thriving here-was written by Miller’s grandmother, Ruth Glosser. Now that Miller has accumulated such extraordinary power over the future of our immigration system, it’s worth turning to this remarkable document , which we’re making available online for the first time. As the book recounts, Wolf Laib managed to bring over more family members in 1906, including a son, Sam Glosser. Over time, Wolf Laib-Miller’s great-great-grandfather-and his descendants built a successful haberdashery business in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which evolved into a chain of supermarkets and department stores. Sam Glosser’s American-born son, Izzy, had two American children, David and Miriam Glosser-who were to become the uncle and mother of Stephen Miller. This story, of course, tracks with that of countless others who arrived in the United States as part of the great migration, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, between the 1880s and the 1910s, which numbered as high as 20 million. As the book notes, they were out to “escape economic hardships and religious persecution” to build a “better life for themselves and their children.” Yet at the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race-it was rooted in the “scientific racism” of the day. But it also involved a somewhat different claim : that the new arrivals suffered from a “social degeneracy” or “social inadequacy”-two typical phrases at the time-which rendered them a threat to the “civilization” the United States was in the process of becoming. In this telling, as prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross declared in a 1914 broadside, these new immigrants were inferior to Americans who descended from the “pioneer breed” who’d given birth to the American nation. The new arrivals, Ross said, had “submerged” that ancestral connection to the “pioneer breed,” setting the nation on a path to the “extinction that surely awaits it.” “There is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political...

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