Stephen Miller, White House aide and key architect of Donald Trump’s immigration policy, said that US would have been better off favouring immigrants from Western and Northern Europe over those from so-called “third world” countries.
Unsuccessful immigrants giving birth to unsuccessful children
Speaking to Fox News, Miller criticised the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which prioritised skills and family reunification over country of origin, saying it had caused a lot of social problems in the US.“What you saw between 1965 and today was the single largest experiment on a society, on a civilisation, that had ever been conducted in human history,” Miller said. He claimed that immigrant communities like Somali-Americans failed to assimilate into the American culture and that their natural-born children were equally unsuccessful: “With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful — again, Somalia is a clear example … but you see very persistent issues in every subsequent generation. You see consistent high rates of welfare use, high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
If you subtract immigration, everything becomes better: Miller
Miller linked immigration to an array of societal challenges: “If you subtract immigration out of test scores, all of a sudden our test scores skyrocket! If you subtract immigration out of health care, all of a sudden we don’t have near to the size of the health care challenges our country faces. If you subtract immigration out of public safety, all of a sudden we don’t have violent crime in so many of our cities. Issue after issue we talk about these things as they things just happen to us. The schools just suddenly fail. Violent crime just suddenly explodes. The deficit just suddenly skyrockets. These are a result of social policy choices that we made through immigration.”
Why First World countries are better according to Miller
Miller praised pre-Civil Rights era (1950-60s) immigration policies that favoured Northern and Western European countries, suggesting these earlier quotas helped form a unified national identity. He compared this to the present day, claiming that immigrants from Africa and other non-Western countries had brought negative outcomes into the US. “If these societies all over the world continue to fail, you have to ask yourself, if you bring those societies into our country, what do you think will happen? You will replicate the conditions they left,” he said.
Why Miller’s views are ‘biased and baseless’
David Bier of the Cato Institute told CNN that Miller is guided by false narratives about immigrants: “His views are baseless smears based on bias, not serious analysis. Immigrants to the United States today are assimilating faster than prior generations. They are more likely to know English, more likely to have graduated college, are more economically productive, and more beneficial to government budgets than in the early 20th century.” Bier added that immigrants today increase productivity, wages, and living standards for US-born citizens while committing fewer crimes. Go to Source