Weekend Read: Trump's anti-immigrant crusader
Stephen Bannon may have left the White House, but anti-immigrant nativism didn't go anywhere.聽
Editor's note: Stephen Miller that Richard Spencer has mentored him.
President Trump made that abundantly clear when he an 鈥淎merica first鈥 philosophy at the U.N. General Assembly this week, touting the importance of and that 鈥渕ajor portions of the world are 鈥 going to hell.鈥
Behind the speech was none other than Stephen Miller, Trump鈥檚 anti-immigrant chief policy adviser.
Miller has flown lower on the national radar than other Trump administration extremists like Bannon or former terrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka, but his background is just as alarming.
While he was still a senator from Alabama, Attorney General Jeff Sessions hired Miller as an aide at the recommendation of David Horowitz, a driving force behind the anti-Muslim extremist movement. Miller was fresh from a college under white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, writing so racist they would stun his future colleagues at Sessions鈥 Senate office.
By the time Miller left Sessions to join the Trump campaign, he had been further steeped in the ideology and rhetoric of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
Founded by John Tanton, the father of today鈥檚 nativist movement, CIS began as a program of the hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and presents itself as an independent think tank conducting serious immigration scholarship.
The fact is, however, CIS has frequently manipulated data to achieve results that align with its nativism 鈥 results that Miller鈥檚 former boss, Sessions, has endorsed and a methodology that Miller seems to have taken to heart.
This week, The New York Times reports that Miller likely played a role in that shows the positive economic impact of resettling refugees in the United States. The Department of Health and Human Services found that refugees brought in $63 million more than they cost over the past decade. Miller, the Times聽wrote,聽鈥減ersonally intervened鈥 to make sure that the administration鈥檚 report would exclude that fact.
This wouldn鈥檛 be the first time that Miller used the White House to fulfill the fantasies of a nativist hate group. First exposed to the anti-Muslim Center for Security Policy (CSP) under Sessions, who received an award from the group in 2015, Miller worked with Bannon to聽write the Muslim ban that CSP has long called for.
Bannon left the White House in August, returning to head Breitbart News,聽鈥渢he platform for the alt-right,鈥 as he has called it. But Miller is still in the White House, serving as a key 鈥 and dangerous 鈥 bridge between the hate groups he has long consorted with and the federal government.
This week鈥檚 U.N. speech is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Editors
P.S. Here are some other pieces we think are valuable this week:
- by Eleanor Klibanoff for Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting
- by Khalil Gibran Muhammad for Boston Review
- by Kyle Swenson for The Washington Post
- by Tasneem Raja for The New Yorker
人兽性交鈥檚 Weekend Readings are a weekly summary of the most important news reporting and commentary from around the country on civil rights, economic and racial inequality, and hate and extremism.聽Sign up to receive Weekend Readings every Saturday morning.