The FRONTLINE Interviews

David Glosser

Stephen Miller's Uncle

David Glosser is the uncle of Stephen Miller, senior policy adviser to President Donald Trump. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, has written and spoken publicly about the stark contrast between his nephew’s family background and the immigration policies he advocates in his role in the White House.

This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore conducted on June 21, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Stephen Miller’s Early Life

So, David, just start out telling me.Miller’s your nephew.Explain the relationship.Your sister?What is Stephen Miller to you?

Yeah.The way this works out is pretty simple.My sister, Miriam, is Stephen Miller’s mom.

Describe Stephen for me.You’ve known him a long time.Describe his persona.Describe what kind of guy he is, how he presents himself.

I’d love to tell you deep, insightful, you know, psychological breakdown of the man, but I have to, you know, in all fairness, I have to say I’ve had very little relationship with him over the years.Most of what I know about him is from his public persona, and that’s what I try to address myself to.You know, I saw him several times during childhood, of course, and perhaps have had maybe three or four or five meaningful conversations with him since his last adolescence and adulthood.Haven’t seen him for the last couple of years, period.

But from that, was he the normal California kid growing up?

Look, he grew up in a privileged family.His mom and dad were in the real estate business.My sister had been a social worker for many years, and then she married, and eventually she went into the—her husband’s family business, which my—which my brother-in-law had more or less inherited the—taken over the family business from his father and had expanded it.

And so Stephen grew up in a household predominantly in Santa Monica.You know, he certainly never wanted for anything.Attended school and had everything he needed.I don’t think he ever had any part-time jobs as a kid.You know, there was household help.You know, it was certainly an upper-middle-class-aspiring lifestyle.

It’s reported—a lot of people say he came from a very liberal background; his parents were very liberal.

That’s untrue.

Tell the truth.

I don’t know where that came from.It’s completely inaccurate.

It’s repeated a lot, though.

Yeah, I don’t know why exactly.I think it’s sort of like once a story gets told, it just sort of becomes the official cant, and everybody sort of repeats the same stories.

So tell us the truth.

Well, my sister was brought up in the same family I was, and in our family, like about 70 percent to 75 percent of all American Jews, were Roosevelt Democrats.And that’s held up pretty much over—since they’ve been measuring such things, that turns out to be the case.And so did Miriam.And she grew up in that same household.We were—we were an upper-middle-class family in a small town, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and we certainly had a comfortable life.Certainly not extravagant by any stretch of the imagination, but we had a very comfortable life.Went to public schools, and we grew up with that same philosophy.

Now, you know, my late father, you know, you’d ask him what his political philosophy was, and it was pretty much “The little guy deserves an even break.”If I heard that once, I heard it a thousand times.And, you know, publications laying around the house were from the ACLU and from, you know, the "New Republic" magazine at the time, which I haven’t read for many years, I don’t even know if they’re still publishing.But that was the general tone of the time.We were very, very conscious of the civil rights movement.My parents were certainly not greatly politically active in any way, but that was—that was very much the tone of the household.

And the idea also that—you know, my folks, my parents came from the generation of people that wouldn’t have existed had they not—had their parents not been able to come to the United States or escape elsewhere.So for them, the reality of religious and race hatred and prejudice and the consequences of it was not some abstract—it was not some abstract concept.This was something—they had lived through World War II, and they knew the consequences very well, as did that whole generation, of what happens when people lose sight of the humanity of others who are not exactly like you, because it can be you just as easily.

Hold off on that.We’ll talk a little bit about that in the future, but let me clean up some things in the beginning.So Stephen grew up, therefore, in a conservative family—

Let me return to that, yes.

—but in a very liberal state.And so what made Stephen Stephen?

Darned if I know.You know, the actual particular nuts and bolts of it I can’t really tell you.I can tell you in general what happened is, in time, as my sister, as she married, she married a gent who was politically conservative, what I would call an economic Republican, certainly not a flamethrower, not an unreasonable guy, certainly not a racist—nothing like that—but who was pretty much what you would call a Reagan Republican, you know, a guy who believed in free enterprise and was easily annoyed by regulations which he thought crippled business activity and so forth.Nothing terribly unusual.Represents a broad spectrum of the American public, certainly the Republican Party.

In time, you know, Miriam seemed to come to adopt his attitudes about politics, which is fine with me.And Stephen grew up in an atmosphere, then, of a Republican family, not in what you’d call a liberal Democratic family at all.

A Conservative Family in a Liberal Neighborhood

A Republican family in a very blue neighborhood.He talks a lot about his high school being very liberal, and he questioned a lot of the values.He was in California, a red state that was quickly turning blue, to some extent due to migration into the state.How does any of that, do you think, sort of affect who Stephen became?Because he is very different than the other kids in the high school, certainly, that he attended.Why do you think Stephen sort of took that path?

You know, I can speculate on it, but certainly he grew up surrounded by the attitudes or influenced by the attitudes of his father.I’ve heard both his speeches and what is written and so forth, and he seems to feel somehow victimized by, you know, the terrible hardships he endured in the Santa Monica public high school, one of the wealthiest districts of the United States of America, living in a home where he wanted for nothing and where all his needs were met.Exactly how he saw himself to become as he seems to portray himself now, as a victim of a great left-wing conspiracy, it’s a little bit hard for me to fathom.

You know, there’s a saying in any language.In any country you go to, they say—it goes something like this: An 18-year-old who isn’t a socialist has no heart.A 40-year-old who isn’t a capitalist has no brain.Now, it’s—so do you expect, you know, 14-to-18-year-old kids to be, how should we say, to be sensitive to the ideas of human goodness and to sharing and so forth?Of course you do; that’s pretty normal.As time goes by and the world beats you up a little bit, your attitudes may certainly change as you actually go out and have to make a living.I don’t recall exactly when Stephen had to actually first go out to make a living, because he was, you know, as I say, he came from a family that had money.

Stephen Miller’s Early Political Action

When I talked to his friends, a couple of his friends from Duke University, a little later, they sort of said the amazing thing about him was that he always seemed to be an older guy.He didn’t seem to change much from when they saw him in college to when he ends up in the White House.From your memory of him, did he seem overly concerned with politics?Did he seem overly feeling attacked by others around him?Did he seem aggressive towards others with other politics beliefs?What was he like?

It’s hard for me to say.Like I said, I never had a warm, close, personal relationship with the guy.My impression is that from an early age—he’s an articulate guy in his own way, and he’s a bright guy in his own way.And it seemed to me from a very early age, from middle adolescence, he somehow became influenced by some of this very, what I regard as a very primitive right-wing kind of propaganda and a vision of things, which is hard for me to fathom, really.

And he received a great deal of notoriety from it.And I know it was a subject of, you know, of amusement and pride to his parents, that as a very young adolescent he was featured on some right-wing radio television—excuse me, radio talk shows.And I think at that time in life, when you achieve some sort of notoriety or distinctiveness and so forth, it can easily—it can easily influence you.It’s a very seductive thing.

And this seems to have been—and so this theme of sort of the right-wing Republicanism, or what now has become populism, seems to have had a tremendous influence on him.And he’s found that as a way to achieve some sort of notoriety or a sense of self-importance, which people seek in life, you know.People want to be something or be somebody, some more than others.And he’s very clearly an extremely ambitious person.

And so it became for him, I think, a vehicle to exercise that ambition and a route forward.And I’m wondering if—this is a kind of a guy I think probably had he grown up in a family which was—if he had grown up in a more left-leaning family, he probably would have gone that way if he’d been able to achieve the same level of notice and notoriety.You can speculate.Does this compensate for some other loss in his life?How the hell do I know?I really don’t know.

It’s interesting, though, that at that young of an age, he was on Larry Elder’s conservative—

Yeah.Shoot me now, yeah.

Radio host.He was on his show repeatedly on issues such as the fact that the high school didn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance enough.He ranted against the Spanish announcements in the school.And he ranted about after 9/11 that there was disrespect, he thought, to the flag and to the government.At one point he sort of says that bin Laden would have been very welcome at his high school.What’s going on at that point?

It’s—it’s very shallow.It’s very silly.It’s very adolescent.And you expect people to grow out of this sort of thing, you know.What’s going on with it?Is—it’s—if you’re a flamethrower, you get noticed.And if you want to be noticed, and if you want to stand out, if you want to be different, when I was a kid you grew your hair long and wore bell-bottom pants.I mean, in his environment, that would not have—that would not have been very distinctive, perhaps.And so it seems that he chose his way to become distinctive.

As to what his actual firm beliefs may have been at that time, who knows?But what we know about social psychology, since I am a psychologist and I know something about it, is that public pronouncements tend to confirm—when you make a public pronouncement about something, it tends to confirm your belief in it.And this becomes—this can become a firm part of your identity.

And so once you’re in for a dime, you’re in for a dollar.And he’s made a successful career out of it.And now he finds himself among—in the corridors of power.Do I expect him to be open to radically different perspectives on his, you know, on his view of human beings in general and of people coming from other countries or other cultures?No, I really don’t expect that.

Stephen Miller as a Descendant of Jewish Immigrants

And the issue specifically of immigration, illegal immigration, he did talk about his resentment towards the Hispanic kids’ sort of influence on his high school.What do you make of that at that early point?

Well, I’ll tell you what I make of it.It shows a tremendous lack of historical knowledge or historical memory of even of his own family, because this is the same crap they said about Jews, our family when we were—when we came into this country.They said we’re taking over everything; we’re bossy; we’re pushy; we’re money grubbers; we’re criminals, etc., etc., etc.We’re clannish; we won’t integrate.And in fact, we couldn’t buy homes in certain areas.You couldn’t get into certain industries or businesses.You couldn’t go to certain colleges or universities.There was quota systems to keep us out, and so on and so forth.The same stuff they said about us.

And to blanket—and to offer the blanket condemnation of people because of their race, their religion, countries of origin, I mean, it shows, particularly in Stephen’s case, or in the case of any Jew who emigrated to this country out of desperation, as most of us did, it’s a completely remarkable forgetting.It’s almost as though someone had gone in and wiped clean your memory banks and installed some other memory that, you know—Stephen is not the descendant of English lords, you know.He is the descendant of impoverished, persecuted peasant Jews living under horrible circumstances for hundreds of years who were finally forced out by intolerable pogroms.And those who couldn’t get out were murdered.And this didn’t happen in ancient history; this happened within the lifetime of his own living family members, lots of his living family members, on both sides of his family.

Who end up—many of them end up in the United States of America.

Well, because what happened is that—I don’t how much of the family history you want to know, but the way it worked out is my great-grandfather’s older brother Moses was the first to come to the United States.He got out of Belarus I think 1903, and not long thereafter, my great-grandfather—his name was Wolf, Wolf-Leib—he had a bunch of kids, impoverished people, just barely scratching by, not making it, in heavy debt.So he followed his brother to the United States.I think it was in 1906, if I’m not mistaken.

And they worked doing sweatshop labor in New York City for a while.Eventually Moses migrated out towards western Pennsylvania, where there was great industrial development at the time.And then not too long thereafter, my great-grandfather followed him, and they started little businesses, you know, pushcart kind of stuff, horse-drawn wagons selling fruit.And then eventually the family was able to get other kinds of jobs, and they invested in a little store, and they turned it into a big business.

Now, what happened to the people that didn’t come over?My great-grandfather was able to, bit by bit, bring the other members of his family over, including my grandfather, Sam.At the time in Antopol, which was a small town in Belarus, there were about 7,000 Jews, as best we can make out, when my grandfather came over with his brothers and sister.When World War II broke out, all but about 2,000 had emigrated, had gotten out of there.

At the end of World War II, those of our direct family—there were 74 members of our direct family who were unable to get out, in large part because of the Immigration Exclusion Act in the United States in 1925.Of those 74 of our family in that town, in that region, all were murdered—shot down, gassed, buried in mass graves.The whole dreadful story of the Holocaust in our family.

In that whole town, the 2,000 Jews that remained in that town, at the end of the war, only seven are known to have survived.This is all well documented.

So in a way, you could say that a form of chain migration saved a large proportion of your family.

It wasn’t a form of chain migration.It was specifically chain migration, much like Mr. Trump’s wife’s family.

So explain that.… What saved your family?

What saved our family was the fact that my great-grandfather was desperate, brave, and had the opportunity to come to the United States, and he was helped by other family members, one other family member who had come to the United States before his older brother, and also that there were voluntary organizations which had been set up specifically to help immigrants come into the United States.

And chain migration?

And then he, bit by bit, was able to save his nickels and dimes and bring over the rest of the family, and that’s how we got our start in this country.And this is the same story you’re going to hear from almost any Jew you talk to in this country.

And was that chain migration?

Of course it was.One after another bringing the next over.

…And if this hadn’t happened with your family, what would have become of Stephen Miller?

He would not have existed, of course.He simply would not have existed.

Stephen Miller Gains Notoriety

Let me go back to the high school for a second.When did you first find out that your nephew was appearing on the radio and was becoming semi-famous?

Oh, well, you know, at various family gatherings, you know, for Thanksgivings and get-togethers of one sort of another this would come up.And, you know, most of us were kind of amazed and bemused, you know, but in order to, how should we say, to keep the peace simply avoided discussing any of this stuff.

… So he goes to Duke University.His connection to David Horowitz becomes an important thing for him.He calls him sort of a mentor.And he goes to Duke, and he sort of establishes a group which is based on Horowitz’s request to conservatives around the country, students, to form these groups, taught to rebel against the liberal establishment in the universities and to push issues such as their rights to debate the issues that they feel strongly about.Do you know much about or anything about his history?What did you hear about his endeavors at Duke, which include his going after liberal professors, his blaming 9/11 on unenforced immigration, his saying that the worshipping of multicultur[al]ism was the downfall of the United States?

And I think in fact they’ve adopted the term “cosmopolitanism” as part of their vocabulary now to vilify people that are interested in other cultures, which is, by the way, exactly the same term used by the fascist dictators of Europe during the 20th century to condemn Jews.

So what’s your take?And also, after the lacrosse rape case that becomes very famous, he takes a very strong stand, and he’s now appearing on Fox television giving interviews.What’s your take on that period of Stephen’s history?

I think there’s two points to make here.One is that you see a hardening of the position and a more, greater extremism.But again, you have to bear in mind that I’m taking this mostly from what he’s written and from what he’s said in public persona, not from inside information.

But what appears to me is a hardening of the position and a gradual move towards frank white supremacism, which is really quite odd to me, because Jews were not considered fully white, and still are not considered fully white in the total American sense in many circles.And it certainly wasn’t the case as we were growing up.We were a distinctive—we were a distinctive group.There was no legal persecution against us, which is why we flourished, but there was certainly a great deal of anti-Semitic sentiment, which has improved over the years as people have gotten to know one another a little better.

So one is there seems to be the hardening of this position.The other interesting thing is, without going into great details, I’ve received communications and letters and so forth from relatives of David Horowitz commiserating with me as they express their horror at what happened to him or the direction he took, and commiserating with me regarding the direction that my nephew took.

So we can see that what goes on, I guess, in my family situation is this intense microcosm of the divisions which are going on in our society.Once racial discrimination, religious persecution, once these things become legitimate sources of political influence, it drives people apart, and we’re seeing that fragmentation of the country.And this is hardly new.The United States has gone through this before, unfortunately, in many different waves.And we’re seeing it now as the country is now more divided than at any time I can remember since the Vietnam War.

Stephen Miller’s Work in the Senate

… When’s the first time you heard that he was getting involved with the—when he went to [then-Sen. Jeff] Sessions’ office, when he was at the Senate—

After [Rep. Michele] [Bachmann]?

When you heard that, what were your thoughts?It seemed like a direction he might have gone, Sessions in Alabama, a senator with infamous or famous or whatever, renown for the idea of his attitudes about immigration and such.Was it a surprise?

Well, it was, you know, as my family members talked about it, we said, well, you know, he’s moving from—he’s moving from the periphery—how can I rephrase that?Let’s see.He’s going from the frying pan into the fire, I suppose, you know.Going on Larry Elder’s show and, you know, throwing flames and so forth, and writing in the Duke newspaper and working—or working for what some would regard as being the—how can I say that?Was working for the—working for the most reactionary elements of the American political spectrum.Moving and then working for Sessions.He had acquired already the reputation of being almost crazily insistent on this particular topic, single-mindedly in a sense, and he’d found somebody who would be the champion of his pet cause.Exactly why he focused on this pet cause, I really couldn’t say.I mean, you know, you could speculate about it, but I have no idea.

Stephen Miller Joins the Trump Campaign

… So when did you first hear that he was involved with the Trump campaign?

I happened to be in Los Angeles visiting my mom, who’s in an assisted living facility out there, and I was staying at my sister’s house, and she probably told me that he’d been appointed a senior adviser to the campaign.That’s when I heard about it.

And your thoughts?

Well, we were having the conversation.She says, “David, I know you’re uncomfortable with Mr. Trump.”And I says, “Well, yes, I am uncomfortable with Mr. Trump for a number of reasons.”But I decided—but I decided not to pursue it [in] any great detail just for the sake of family peace.I knew she was thrilled and proud about, you know, about her son’s success and so on.I just didn’t feel—I didn’t think there was any—at that stage of the game—well, you know, if Trump loses, Stephen will go back to, go back to, you know, to writing these inflammatory articles and working for politicians of one sort or another, and that will be that.Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way.

Were you surprised that he had taken that path, that he was there, that he was at that—?

Oh, by that time, no, absolutely not.Yeah, there was—all the signs were evident, yeah.As soon as Jeff Sessions went over to the Trump camp, it became clear that that was the pathway for Stephen to move forward.Of course, we all know what happened with Mr. Sessions.

… The warmup speeches that we talked about.So he became the guy who would come out before Trump and would give the warmup speech.They were amazing speeches, and they got a lot of attention.They were spread to a lot of people that wanted to watch them.Did you ever watch any of these speeches?And what were your thoughts?

Yeah, the one that came to my attention in particular was the one that he gave in my hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which is a Rust Belt city which has undergone dramatic decline since the 1970s, and in it he invoked the family name.And since he had spent some weeks there in the summers when he was a kid, he invoked the name of my father, the family business, all of a good reputation in the town.And I could pretty much, you know, see my dad spinning in his grave as his name was linked to a—to his populist cause and that the family’s name was being drawn towards this.

Accordingly, I wrote a letter to post in the town’s newspaper regarding the points that he made in his speech.That was probably—that was my first public statement on the subject.Up until then, I’d held my peace.

Describe the speech.Describe how he presented it, the things that he was saying that you questioned.

It was a pack of lies.It was the distortion of the history of the town.It was a series of well-thought-out false promises about bringing back 19th-century level manufacturing and coal mining to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when in fact that was—they were not going to reopen the mills; the mills could not be reopened.The coal mines were not going to get started back again.There were not going to be thousands of low-skilled diggers living in poor company towns, more or less enslaved, digging coal out of the hillsides.That stuff had all gone away 80 years ago.The last of the mills had closed long before that.These were museum pieces.

Then there was the part of blaming immigrants for the rise of crime and drug addiction.Well, unfortunately, that’s not really the case.And the reason Johnstown underwent its economic decline has nothing to do with that.Johnstown had undergone its economic decline for other reasons, very clearly—very simple, and I’d be happy to give you the economics lesson here, but it’ll just bore people to death.It’s all well known.The steel industry collapsed in the United States because these kinds of jobs are more efficiently done overseas, and when protectionism of the steel industry went out, the bottom—in the United States went protectionism went out, the bottom fell out.

But what was the reaction of the crowds?

… In order to rile up the crowd, you have to tell them that your miseries are not your own fault, are not a result of any—not a result of misfortune.They’re the result of plots against you by people who are keeping you down.If it wouldn’t be for those other people, you’d be—everything would be wonderful, and we could turn back the clock.

Well, it was never that wonderful in Johnstown.It was a tough town.Tough town to make a living.Tough work.And the thing that was so odious about the Trump campaign, and which remains an odious factor, is the propensity to blame other people, to blame others, to blame foreigners.

But this is your nephew—

Yeah.

—up there.

Drives me crazy.And so I couldn’t—I really couldn’t stand it.And so I decided it was time to write this article, at least in my hometown, to let them know the family, you know, my position on it and frankly that of many of my family who urged me to do so.

… You get pretty biting afterwards about some of what you were seeing.You were seeing what you consider to be tactics denigrating, like what the Nazis did denigrating Jews during the war and before the war.

Let’s take a listen to one of Mr. Trump’s campaign speeches, particularly about the Muslim ban.And this was—and it’s been reported that much of this emerges from the pen of Stephen Miller.What I did mentally as the speeches were being given is I take the word “Muslim” out, and I just insert the word “Jew.”Or if you’re Irish, take the word “Muslim” out and insert the word “Catholic.”Or if you’re Italian or Bulgarian or from any other countries, any other ethnic groups that came to this country to escape desperation, see how you feel about it.I encourage everybody to take that test.Get a transcript of that speech.Get the word “Muslim” out of there and put in your own ethnic group in there, so that we’re going to stop all Jews from coming to this country.They spread crime, they’re terrorists, and so on and so forth.

And do the same thing with the other speeches about the Central Americans and the Mexicans and so forth.This is all hate mongering.It’s all the same kind of lies and slander that were put together not only by the so-called America Firsters, after the First World War, before and after the First World War.This was the same exact sort of speech that came out of Mussolini’s mouth, that came out of Goebbels’ mouth, came out of Hitler’s mouth.

The idea—somehow the reason why you folks are having a hard time is not because you’ve been ill-governed and led into a terrible war and that the concentration of wealth in your country has been magnified into the hands of very few; that’s not your problem.The problem is that you have been tricked and deceived by this particular ethnic group or this religious group.You are genetically, racially superior.You will rule the world.Let me lead you forward.

This is the message that was given so explicitly and with such dreadful consequences in the lead-up to World War II.Is it this bad in America?No, it’s not.We have to acknowledge that.But we also have to be sensitive to the fact that this sort of racial hatred and this sort of stirring up of ethnic prejudices is extremely dangerous to democracy.What keeps us safe in this country is not human nature.Human nature’s rather unpredictable.What keeps us all safe in this country—Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, black, white, Hispanic, Asian—what keeps us safe are the strong institutions of democracy and the laws which—that hold those institutions up.That’s what keeps us safe.That’s how a multicultural society can live together.If we tear those down, we’re all in danger.

What Motivates Stephen Miller?

… You don’t believe that possibly what is driving Stephen is he’s just trying to create a better life for Americans that are here.They won’t lose jobs to other people; that there is a level of crime that comes in that will be stopped.

Listen, I think the main motivating force, both for Mr. Trump and for Stephen, has nothing really to do with that.It has to do with what is an issue we can use to stimulate fears and anxieties which we can use as a tool of political manipulation in order to gain, secure and maintain power.It’s the lust for power.It’s the lust for influence.

There are others who are going to be interested in Mr. Trump’s politics because it’s of some economic benefit to them.There are others who just feel—a great many people, like in my hometown, who saw the jobs which they thought were going to be there forever and the skills that they thought would be valuable forever, they all went away as technology changed.Nobody was really prepared for the rapid pace of globalism and the huge increase in the velocity of technical change.There were a great many people who feel left behind, and who were, in fact, left behind, and for whom their hopes and their dreams were shattered.

And then when we had the—when we had the collapse, the near collapse of our economy in the great recession, many of those people lost their homes; they lost their jobs.And most importantly, they lost their sense of purpose and their sense of dignity.And they were angry, upset and scared.What does the future hold for them?They feel like they’ve been ripped off, and they have been.

But it’s complicated issues which have led to all this happening.You know, they’re now competing in a world which is rapidly developing, and other talented people elsewhere in the world are competing with them for the same resources.And so they need somebody upon whom to fix the blame, some simple solution.People can’t sit down and listen to really complicated material for a long time.They’re looking for a simple solution.

And that’s what Stephen and Trump have found for them, a simple solution: Your problem is all these damn Hispanics coming into the country.If you really wanted to fix immigration, which is a serious issue, we could do it.We’ve done it before; we can do it again.If we really wanted to exercise our responsibilities in the world to help the real desperate refugees who are running away from war, we could do it.Certainly in proportion to our size and our population and our wealth, we could do it.

Can’t do it for everybody, but we can do it in proportion to our means and our aims.That’s one of the things that makes us a decent society.That’s one of the things that makes it worth living here.

When you see where he is now and what he’s doing on issues, the stance he’s taking, he’s writing or he’s involved dramatically with, on DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], on the arrests, the mass arrests of families in cities around the country and the attempt to create fear for others south of the border, Central America so they won’t come up, so that the numbers drop, what’s your overview?

… The overview is, why do we—what could we do if we wanted to do something useful to help the immigration problem?Everybody knows.Talk to immigration experts, people who have been working for years in the field in government, or even in the private world.Say, well, first of all, you have to help stabilize the governments in Central America, invest in those countries, help them with policing, help them with economic development, help them with education so that those people can look forward to a safe life in their own countries, where they want to stay.It’s where all their family is; it’s where all their roots are; it’s where their language is.They don’t want to leave.But they have to leave.It’s an act of desperation.

So if we really wanted to do something about it, we could.And there have been American politicians who have wanted to do so and have made reasonable plans.

Plus, every time you walk into a supermarket in the United States and walk out with groceries which represent a lower portion of your income than in any other developed country—food’s cheap in this country.Why is it cheap?It’s cheap because we have foreign laborers who come in to harvest it for us and to grow it for us.You’re going to have a chicken for dinner tonight?You know, that chicken wasn’t plucked by an American worker.That chicken was plucked and packed by a Central American or a Mexican or somebody else from another country.

American industry has need for these folks.And everybody, you know, just imagine a day in America, a week in America without immigrants, without these immigrants.All your services would start to collapse very quickly.

So if we wanted to make a difference, we could have a reasonable immigration for people—not immigration, reasonable guest-worker laws offering these people some level of protection to make sure they aren’t being exploited or abused.We’d be able—we’d strengthen the countries’ economies and security apparatus from the source countries.And we’d—and we would help to integrate people, the people that absolutely have to leave their country because of persecution and fear.We’d help to integrate them successfully into this country so they can make the contributions in this country that might—similar to those made by my family and millions of other immigrants.

That’s how we solve the problem.But the Trump administration is not interested in solving this problem at all.They’re interested in the political—the political calculus of it all.I think there’s, frankly, an understanding that as the time goes by, the racial complexion of the country is changing.It alarms some people.They don’t like it; they don’t want to have cultural change; they don’t want to have more immigrants.And I think from the point of view of the Republican Party, all of the standard-bearers of which all publicly reviled Trump initially have all become his acolytes now that he’s in power, because I think they understand that the electoral calculus is shifting away from their chances of remaining in power.As time goes by, probably in 40 years, white people will no longer be an absolute majority in the country, and the Republican Party doesn’t like this.

Condemnation from Miller’s Uncle

Finally from me, why did you go public with some of these views, specifically on Stephen?What was at stake that made you feel that you needed to talk a little bit about what you knew about and what, as you called it, his hypocrisy?

Jim, that’s the wrong question.The question isn’t, why did I do it?The question is, why hasn’t everybody else done it?Why haven’t the many hundreds of thousands of immigrants, children and grandchildren who have profited from the opportunities given to them and the safety provided to them in this country, why haven’t they opened their hearts and opened their mouths to stand up to denounce this?

This is bad for democracy.It’s dangerous for democracy.It’s bad for our country.

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