By Paul Nachman
08/14/2018
In a blog post here, Peter Brimelow commented [Stephen Miller’s Uncle Raises Question: Should Jews Have Been Allowed To Immigrate?, August 13, 2018] on the noise that the uncle of Trump adviser Stephen Miller made, in a Politico piece [Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle, August 13, 2018], about young Miller’s favored immigration policies.
The uncle, David Glosser, is Jewish. So is Miller.
And so is PowerLine blog’s Paul Mirengoff, who also did a workmanlike job in analyzing the Glosser article’s multifaceted juvenility [Stephen Miller’s Insufferable Uncle, August 13, 2018], leading off with the point that "But for Glosser’s status as Stephen Miller’s uncle, I don’t think Politico would even have considered running it."
(While we're at it, I’m half-Jewish; "Nachman" is a Jewish name.)
Mirengoff’s piece is worth reading for its thoroughness.
But a couple of the comments at the piece really score. By commenter Jason Purnolo:
There were certain laws that were appropriate 100 years ago, but aren’t today, given the way that the country has changed. Is that really such a difficult concept?
And it would be so satisfying if we could shove the sarcasm of commenter Doug Saunders …
Not only is [Miller] a hypocrite because of a series of events that happened in the distant past, he’s very likely a hypocrite because of something someone else might do in the distant future.
… down Uncle David’s throat.
In his post about Uncle David, Peter Brimelow quoted several paragraphs about Jewish immigrants from the late, lamented Lawrence Auster (who was ethnically Jewish) to good effect. The Saunders stinger just above reminds me of something else that Larry wrote:
“If it hadn’t been for immigration, I would have been smoke.”
This piquant remark, by the neoconservative writer Midge Decter, expresses the profound gratitude of an American Jew whose family avoided the Nazi genocide by coming to the United States in the early twentieth century. It is meaningless as a pronouncement on immigration policy. There are innumerable people in many countries whose families did not come and never thought of coming to the United States, yet who have suffered unspeakably in their native lands. A half million Rwandan Tutsis were horribly massacred by the rival Hutus in 1994. If those Tutsis and their relatives had come to the United States in, say, 1980, they would be alive today. Does that mean that the Tutsis — all several million of them, just to be on the safe side — should have come here? Should all the people in the world who may possibly suffer persecution at some future time — a major portion of the human race — be allowed into the United States as a preventive measure? If we made a general principle out of Midge Decter’s family history, we would be obligated to admit everyone in the world who wanted to immigrate, because we couldn’t tell for sure if something bad might not happen to them in the future if they stayed where they are.
[Italics in original.]
That passage is from page 51 of Larry’s 1997 booklet-length essay Huddled Cliches: Exposing the Fraudulent Arguments that Have Opened America’s Borders to the World [PDF; HTML version here]. Committed immigration patriots who are relatively new to the fray can make excellent use of an hour by reading it, an important part of Larry’s bequest to his country.
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