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By Sanwar Ali
Stephen Miller’s family fled pogroms in Eastern Europe
Stephen Miller senior policy adviser to Donald Trump has made the news recently with numerous calls for his resignation, including from Jewish groups, due to him promoting White Supremacist ideas. Miller who is Jewish and whose grandfather fled the pogroms in the early 1900s in what is now Belarus seems to be encouraging support for people with an extremist white nationalist agenda, and perhaps a similar belief structure to those who were involved in the persecution of Jews in Belarus all those years ago. If it was not the pogroms that made the local Jewish population want to escape, there was also the Russian Czar who conscripted children for his army. Such was this terrible life they had to endure and such were the pressures for the local Jews to leave Belarus.
Stephen Miller’s Uncle Dr Davis S Glosser’s opinion piece in Politico
Stephen Miller’s Uncle Dr David S Glosser wrote a lengthy and highly critical opinion piece on 13 August 2018 entitled “Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle” about the attitudes of both his nephew and President Trump. Both the President of the United States and Stephen Miller families both benefitted from chain migration. This is a system that they criticize now. However, it enabled their families to escape poverty, persecution and in the case of Miller’s family possible death.
Dr Glosser also had the following to say in CNN's New Day show.
"Our family were immigrants, in fact they we were refugees,"
"If my ancestors had not immigrated to the United States when they did, if they had waited a few more years until 1924, the door would've been shut."
"My parents would have gone up the crematory chimney, I wouldn't have been born, my sister wouldn't have been born. And certainly Stephen would never have existed."
US Immigration Policy a hundred years ago
A hundred years ago the US was gripped with xenophobic sentiment. There were concerns that Eastern and Southern Europeans immigrants would “mongrelize” the nation, and that “anglo-saxon” society would not survive in it’s present form. Perhaps similar to the “white genocide” concerns amongst white supremacists now.
The authors of a 1920 congressional report recommended a “temporary suspension of immigration” and wrote the following about the Jews then living in Poland:
“It is impossible to overestimate the peril of the class of emigrants coming from this part of the world, and every possible care and safeguard should be used to keep out the undesirables.”
Rae Kushner the grandmother of Jared Kushner on life in Poland
Stephen Miller is not the only one who has come under attack for their views and potential hypocrisy. Jared Kushner son-in-law of Donald Trump and also a top adviser has also been criticised by his own family for his support of Trump.
Rae Kushner the grandmother of Jared Kushner was from Novogrudok in Poland. The Nazis came in 1941 and jews were put into the Novogrudok ghetto, which was eventually whittled down from roughly 30,000 Jews to 350. Eventually with some difficulty the Kushner family managed to escape to the US in 1949.
Rae Kushner had the following to say:
“For everybody [there] was a place…but for the Jews, the doors were closed. We never can understand this. Even our good President Roosevelt, how come he kept the doors so closed for us, `for such a long time? How come a boat [the SS St. Louis] went for exodus on the water and returned back to be killed? This question I’ll never know, and nobody will give me the answer.”
Role of society to help refugees and other migrants
There is the question of the role of society in helping migrants. Is it right for society to ignore the suffering and persecution of others? Do refugees cause such huge problems that they should be kept out? That is what Trump and Miller would have you believe.
