Outside the Beltway

The Ugly Ignorance and Illusions of Miller’s Xenophobia

Miller continues to invite comparisons to the ugliest ideology of the 20th century.

Steven L. Taylor · Monday, December 29, 2025 · 4 comments

So I noted the following from the Deputy Chief of Staff on Friday:

It was so absurd on so many levels that I actually checked to make sure it was’t a parody account. But, of course, it isn’t.

By now, it is possible that the reader has already encountered a take-down of the tweet, but I just feel the need to say the following.

First, and part of the reason this felt like a parody, is that this is such an on-the-nose thing for a bigot to say without noting how self-contradictory it is. It could also be an attempt to poke fun at someone like Miller by trying to make it seem that he doesn’t realize how ridiculous the content of his tweet is. But, rather than being some attempt at satire, this is Miller doing what so many bigots do: ignore the self-contradictory problem with hating on immigration, because Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra are the children of immigrants.

They exemplify not some past purity vision of White America producing its culture all by itself. No, citing those names, especially Sinatra, is to demonstrate how much of American culture has been generated by the children of immigrants. Frank Sinatra was, and in many ways still is, a major American cultural icon. But his parents were Italian immigrants who came during a period of fairly open borders (more open than now, I would note).

Miller’s tweet is utterly self-defeating from his own ideological point of view. (And we won’t even get into the fact that Miller’s own great-grandparents were immigrants).

Some additional thoughts:

Second, Miller is engaged in a weird nostalgia about decades in the past (which is on point, given his reactionary ideology). Presumably, he is talking about the Dean Martin & Frank Sinatra Family Christmas Show, which aired in 1967. Not quite the 50s, which is where so much MAGA nostalgia centers, but Martin and Sinatra are avatars of that era, without any doubt.

Third, Miller is just lying about “infinity migrants from the third world.” While I am sure that there are people out there who advocate for utterly open borders and draining the whole of the world into the United States, this is not what any mainstream debate is about.

Fourth, Italians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (when Sinatra’s and Martin’s families would have come to the US) would have decidedly been considered the colloquial equivalent of the “third world” (although the term would not be invented until the mid-20th century).

Fifth, is this guy so consumed with hate and fear that he watches a 58-year-old Christmas special and it makes him think about how much he hates immigrants? Spoiler: Yes. Yes, he is.

The errors are multiple. The core problem, at least for Miller, is that he is proving the direct opposite of what his ideology preaches: people like Martin and Sinatra are quintessential examples of how migration enriches America and that, indeed, diversity is our strength.

How much of art, science, and industry is the result of immigrants and their children?

A simple example: I had a Star Trek rerun on the hotel TV when I started writing this. Just looking at this one example, I am reminded that my life has been enhanced by Canadians Bill Shatner and James Doohan. Leonard Nimoy was the child of Ukrainian immigrants. George Takei’s father was born in Japan, and, of course, some Stephen Miller of the time had his family put in an internment camp. Walter Koenig’s parents were Russian Jews.

That’s just one simple example: two immigrants and three sons of immigrants. That kind of outcome is easily replicated across shows, movies, and, of course, in industry (not to mention families*).

All of this is made all the more absurd by another Miller tweet on Saturday.

I guess we will just ignore that Oppenheimer’s father was an immigrant from Prussia, and never mind the role German immigrant Wernher von Braun played in the rocket program (to name just two very famous examples). The notion that the American automobile industry, its development of atomic weapons, and its mastery of the space race were all the result of “heritage” Americans and that immigration is to be seen as nothing but a negative is historically inaccurate and also quite foolish.

By the way, if anyone doubts the usefulness of celebrating things like Black History Month (or any other group), just look at how Herr Miller is trying to whitewash prominent immigrants and/or children of immigrants from the collective consciousness. We need more reminders of who brought us where we are, not fewer.

BTW, I know that “third world” is doing a lot of racist work in Miller’s demented formulations, but Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are from South Africa, which would have been categorized as “third world” back when that was a thing, and even now ranks lower than many Latin American countries in terms of a variety of development variables. Of course, hue is a variable that Miller considers and that most empirical assessments of development leave out.

There is also an entire digression that needs to note how enslaved Africans (you know, the “third world”) literally helped build America, including the White House where Miller works.

There is also the fact that all but one of Trump’s children are the children of an immigrant, as is true of all of JD Vance’s kids. The lack of any kind of real self-awareness about what he is preaching and saying is pretty stunning, but it also speaks to the way ideology can blind a person.

I think it is important to not only comment on the specifics of Miller’s rants, but also to continually remind everyone that this all sounds a lot like Hitler (see my post entitled Echoes of Mein Kampf, also about Miller, for details). Miller’s fantasies are backward-looking attempts to propagate an imaginary past wherein we are supposed to concentrate on the “real” non-immigrant Americans (or the “heritage” Americans) who created a magical culture full of wonderful TV specials and space flight! And in the telling, we will just utterly forget how the heroes of the tale, both the artists and the scientists, were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. And in the telling, we will just keep pointing to the “third world” as some terrible place full of undesirable people.

I have noted more than once that this sounds very much like Hitler’s own backward-looking fantasies about the way things were when the world was right, and the Aryan dominated the Fatherland. Never mind that it was all a fantasy, and never mind that Hitler himself did not present as a tall, blond, blue-eyed Aryan godling in the same way that Miller, a Jewish man only a couple of generations removed from immigrants himself, is not the White Christian Mayflower-descended Heritage American.

One thing is for certain: Miller is one of the most odious persons to achieve significant political power in the United States in my lifetime. And even his passing observations about old TV specials reinforce this fact.

*My wife’s father was an immigrant, as was her maternal grandmother. My sister-in-law is a first-generation American. How many of us can immediately identify immigrants in our families?