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| Stephen Miller, Presidential Advisor, via Wikipedia |
I became disillusioned enough with the hapless Carter Presidency to caucus for Kennedy in the 1980 Texas caucuses. It had nothing to do with Kennedy's policies; it was mostly a protest against Carter and a sense of a connection with the legacy of Ted's brothers Jack and Robert. But shortly thereafter I started work on my MBA part-time at night at the University of Houston. I never had a single professor who shared his political opinions publicly or privately, but as I took my first tough graduate economics classes (prerequisites for MBA studies), my political perspective shifted, as I developed a more skeptical outlook on government interventions and views more consistent with my fiscal conservatism. If anything, I remember my marketing professor admonished my more strident views on an assignment. (Ironically, my professor would later move to the University of Georgia and become the famous perpetrator of a murder/suicide in 2009, an event I discussed in my blog.)
So there's a sense of irony when Kennedy initiated the hostilities against the Bork nomination that my emerging conservatism confronted whatever the hell I was thinking in 1980, and when he and the other Democrats had sabotaged probably the most qualified jurist ever nominated to SCOTUS, I was done with the Democrats. I wasn't thrilled with the GOP, but they were the political adversaries to the Democrats. Ironically, I wasn't that thrilled with the Reagan Presidency; true, he had delivered on taxes but had done little to cutback on spending. Promises to end federal intervention in education were never realized, etc.
I do realize that the GOP under Harding and Coolidge had taken the first steps (beyond the racist restrictions against Chinese in the late nineteenth century) to restrict legal immigration in the form of a quota system, which persists to this very day. This contradiction to our traditional immigrant roots had been articulated by Lincoln in an 1855 letter on the anti-immigrants of his day, the Know Nothings:
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.
From the perspective of authentic conservatives, who revere our traditional liberties, like a free market, and other traditions, including a small government, the intervention against open immigration is economically illiterate, hypocritical, and grossly immoral; the imposition of a strong central government to enforce arbitrary restrictions, like Lincoln referenced against the idea of the equality of men, is the antithesis of liberty: your rights to restrict the liberty of others ends at your property line. Trying to scapegoat immigrants for the costs of our dysfunctional social welfare net or crime is particularly disingenuous; immigrants tend to have lower proportional ratios than natives. (In fact, legalized immigrants cannot apply for government subsidies for the first years of residency.) The labor protectionism angle also interferes in the voluntary agreement between employer and employees.
Still, one can argue that the Dems have hardly been pro-immigrant since the 1920's:
- their labor union constituency dislikes what they see as lower-wage foreign workers driving down wages
- FDR turned away European Jewish refugees from the Nazi holocaust
- JFK and LBJ under union pressure scrapped the Bracero program which legalized Mexican farmer/other workers
- Obama cast deciding votes killing the 2007 bipartisan immigration effort.
In fact, one can argue that several GOP Presidents over the past 60-odd years have been generally supportive of immigration:
- Eisenhower legalized most Mexican migrant workers, dropping arrests more than 90%
- Reagan and GHW Bush both signed immigration reform bills
- GW Bush embraced immigration reform during his second term.
Stephen Miller is Trump's immigration policy adviser, articulating his policies, including:
- the infamous family separation policy at the border as a deterrent
- the Muslim-related travel ban
- support for Cotton's measure cutting LEGAL immigration quotas
- throwing resources at the Mexican border (the Wall, Border Patrol increased staffing, and most recently the US military)
Now, to be honest, Trump doesn't need to blame Miller for a tone he struck all on his own at the start of his 2016 campaign. Keep in mind unauthorized foreign visitors are actually on the decline since 2007. Much of that had to do with an anemic American economy and an improving Mexican economy. And keep in mind we have had declining trends in violence, Trump notably had blamed Romney's 2012 loss on his "cruel" self-deportation policy, i.e., Romney felt if the US government harassed immigrants enough, they would leave on their own.
Trump made his anti-Mexican rhetoric part of his campaign from the start, accusing Mexico of dumping its violent offenders at the border. It largely feeds off a handful of anecdotal incidents and tries to portray 11 million residents as drug lords and gang members. He seeks to portray foreign refugees as closet terrorists requiring "extreme vetting" despite there is no statistical evidence to suggest that foreign visitors materially pose a security risk.
No, Miller isn't responsible for Trump's political exploitation of immigration to manipulate his right-wing xenophobic base. But even if Trump is responsible for his actions, it infuriates me that my confiscated tax dollars are being used to promote a morally corrupt form of xenophobic policy, a rejection of our open immigration roots.
I've mentioned before that I had never heard of Stephen Miller before. I was listening to a Sunday talk soup podcast while writing a blog post when I heard some rabid anti-immigrant promoting his nonsense to the point I had to stop what I was doing to identify the fool. And my opinion has not improved over the interim.
I suspect that when historians review Trump's first 2 years, they will view them as largely a missed opportunity, that Trump wasted political capital on a pushing-on-a-thread agenda not moving the needle on feckless policies. Miller as the face of Trump's corrupt anti-immigration policy is this year's easy choice. I never thought I would see the pro-family GOP trying to rationalize legalized kidnapping.
