November 28 Friday roundup

In the latest podcast episode, I look at the long history of Trump’s mistreatment of women, as well as how this history repeats and extends the twentieth-century authoritarian playbook. You can watch the podcast episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.

Today, I want to write about the long legacy of hatred represented by White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller. Miller posted yesterday about a man from Afghanistan who was given asylum by the U.S. this year, and is now accused of shooting two U.S. National Guard members from West Virginia. A 20-year-old woman, Sarah Beckstrom, was shot along with Andrew Wolfe near Farragut Square in Northwest D.C. on Wednesday.

Beckstrom died today, and Wolfe remains in critical condition. In response to the shooting, the U.S. government announced this evening that it will halt all asylum claims, as well as any visa consideration for Afghan nationals. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller posted on X on Friday, “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

People were comparing Miller’s comment to statements made about Jews under Nazi rule. Though the parallel seems obvious enough, I know that comparisons to Nazis can sometimes seem too flip or over the top. So in this post, I’ll address the idea of assimilation from foreign cultures in countries other than Germany—and mostly the United States—by residents looking to exclude those they see as a lesser race or subhuman. This rhetoric has echoed again and again all over the world, and it leads to gruesome results.

While the Third Reich was expanding its concentration camp system to include extermination camps, Xavier Vallat was speaking in 1942 at the Ecole Nationale des Cadres Civiques in France, arguing the fundamentally unassimilable nature of Jews in Europe. (For a time, Vallat was the Commissioner General for Jewish Questions in Vichy France.)

After the war, he did not change his rhetoric. And you can hear exactly the same argument that Stephen Miller made this week when Vallat was tried by the High Court of Justice after the war. He declared, “The Jew is not only an unassimilable foreigner” but his “implantation tends to form a state within the state.”

Still, it’s not necessary to look as far as Europe for examples of what Miller is saying and realize the harm this language can do. The U.S. has always had its own debates over assimilation, in part because who gets to be fully American has always been in contention in a country that has tried to assert that the British immigrants who killed and expelled the indigenous inhabitants were the legitimators of sovereignty and citizenship on U.S soil.

Perhaps not surprisingly, our newspapers played on this sense that new residents seen by some as illegitimate were somehow permanently incapable of becoming Americans. A May 1880 opinion piece from the New York Times suggested, “There is a limit to our powers of assimilation, and when it is exceeded, the country suffers from something like indigestion.”

Setting aside for now the question of whether assimilation is something a country does to minority groups, or something immigrants do voluntarily, it is clear that historically, malicious actors have declared entire groups of people in the U.S. completely incapable of assimilating or being assimilated.

In “Excluded, Segregated, and Forgotten,” Joyce Kuo narrates how Chinese immigrants in 1870s California were deemed "inferior and unassimilable." Their work ethic, physical appearance, and religious traditions were all impugned and treated as signs of inferiority. These judgments didn’t just happen in day-to-day life. They also appeared in court opinions, academic texts, and political statements.

While not targets of the same kind of sweeping legislative restrictions barring citizenship altogether, the Irish likewise found themselves portrayed as inferior and incapable of integrating into American society. A decade ago, the New York Times did a writeup of how the phrase “No Irish need apply” appeared in dozens of ads, as well as slightly more circumspect phrases indicating people refused to accept Irish Applicants. (The more delicately worded ads requested “a Protestant girl” for positions of cook or nanny, sometimes specifying German or “Scotch” candidates.)

From the latter half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, Italians also faced exclusionary treatment in the U.S. and were vilified as racially inferior and unassimilable. Italian immigrants found themselves lynched, beaten, and classified as nonwhite in some southern states. The assumption that this community could never become part of (white) society only faded in the second half of the last century.

An 1880s editorial cartoon from The Mascot in New Orleans suggested getting rid of “the Italian population” by putting them in cages that would be dropped into open water. The panel that outlines “the way to arrest them” shows nothing so much as a late-nineteenth-century version of contemporary ICE and Border Patrol tactics, featuring immigrants being dragged and assaulted. The main difference is that the victims in this case are thrown into a wheeled wagon instead of a van.

Trump era

Every president in the last half-century has praised immigrants and immigration, even as they often embraced policies encouraging or allowing mistreatment of those seeking to enter the country. The national myth was of the U.S. as a melting pot. By assimilating, immigrants could become a true part of American greatness.

As with so many other aspects of the presidency, Donald Trump has kept the ignorant and violent aspects of American history while trying to destroy any policies that actually led to stability, democratization, or national betterment.

In his first administration, he named places with predominantly Black populations “shithole countries” and wondered about how to increase immigration from Norway. He regularly disparaged Muslims worldwide and tried to institute a Muslim ban.

In his second administration, we’re now seeing a much greater demonization of immigrants, from Haitians to Somalians. The only refugees Trump currently seems to be encouraging are white South Africans, who claim persecution from a government run by Black Africans.

Trump has also made a political football of antisemitism, using it as weapon to attack universities that his administration has claimed are not adequately protecting their Jewish students. But he is often attacking Jewish professors and administrators with these allegations, and it’s become clear that, for him, the issue is a power grab to decimate political opposition from the academic world.

Which is not to say that antisemitism in America isn’t real. And, as with other minority groups in the U.S., the country has a long history of bigotry against immigrant Jews. In the image below, a 1920s U.S. Congressional committee report calls Jews "unassimilable," "dangerous," “socially undesirable,” "mentally deficient," and worse.

In my book on Nabokov, I wrote about how Lolita narrator Humbert Humbert, a European who fled France during World War II, sees clearly the antisemitic prejudice woven into everyday American society. As he crosses the country, he recognizes the meaning of the signs that read, “No Dogs” and “Near Churches.”

These signs were meant to indicate that Jews would be refused service. The full phrase still seen at the time (which was perhaps too obvious for Nabokov to use in his novel) was “No Dogs, No Coloreds, No Jews.” Humbert recalls seeing a dog in the hotel lobby where the sign hung and wondered if perhaps it had been baptized.

While Nabokov was working on Lolita in upstate New York, the “Near Churches” phrase meant to exclude Jews appeared more than a thousand times in resort listings in the New York Times. These were the same kinds of listings that the author looked through to plan road trips with his Jewish wife Véra.

The “Near Churches” language became popular only after more obviously discriminatory language had been outlawed. As Nabokov struggled to shape the novel that would transform his life, the Anti-Defamation League brought an official complaint about these listings to the State of New York, stating that everyone knew that the purpose of this language was to exclude Jewish people from these establishments.

It’s language that might well have been used against the family of Trump henchman Stephen Miller at some point: his mother’s family came to the U.S. just over a century ago. They were Jews fleeing economic hardship in what is today Belarus.

As his uncle wrote years ago in a public statement denouncing Miller and his hypocritical tactics, “I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”

Miller’s hypocrisy is disappointingly common. Immigrants who finally manage to get legal paperwork in the U.S. sometimes want to pull the ladder up after themselves, arguing that the next minority coming in isn’t legitimate.

But it’s usually those in power who drive the exclusionary conversation and can take action to enforce it. And when it comes to immigration, no one has more power right now than Steven Miller. Thus we hear for millionth time in the same hackneyed language, that foreigners can’t assimilate.

Yet Stephen Miller is just the most recent in a long line of hatemongers and hatchet men. When people seem different or ill at ease in a new culture, distrusting them is an easy kind of hatred to get people to buy into, due in part to our history of racial and ethnic exclusion.

But we don’t have to fall for it. Today Adam Rothman posted a better example from history that we might aspire to. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1867 about Chinese migration,

“If we would reach a degree of civilization higher and grander than any yet attained, we should welcome to our ample continent all the nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples, and as fast as they learn our language and comprehend the duties of citizenship, we should incorporate them into the American body politic. The outspread wings of the American eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come.”

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