{"id":81,"date":"2026-05-26T09:38:42","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T09:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=81"},"modified":"2026-05-26T09:38:42","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T09:38:42","slug":"stephen-millers-impossible-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=81","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Miller\u2019s Impossible America"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This article appears in the\u00a0<\/em>June 2026<\/em>\u00a0issue of<\/em>\u00a0The American Prospect magazine.<\/em> If you\u2019d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more The Real Moral Majority<\/a><\/p>\n

Last New Year\u2019s Eve, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted an image online of an inviting, deserted beach with a classic mid-20th-century car parked on the sand. In the sky were the words \u201cAmerica After 100 Million Deportations,\u201d and above the image was a caption, \u201cThe peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.\u201d<\/p>\n

This fantasy scenario, the removal of more than a quarter of the U.S. population, didn\u2019t come from a random online troll. It was posted on X by the official feed of the federal agency charged with immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n

The driving force behind the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to stop the \u201cthird world\u201d from \u201cbesieging\u201d the United States is Stephen Miller, the president\u2019s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. Just four days before the post by DHS, Miller himself had tweeted another fantasy: \u201cSomeone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon\u2014but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for sixty years.\u201d<\/p>\n

More from Paul Starr<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s that euphemism \u201cthird world\u201d again, so much more discreet than the explicitly racial terms Miller\u2019s forerunners used when they shut down immigration a century ago. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that Miller describes as opening our borders to the third world abolished the national origin quotas from 1924 that had limited immigration mainly to Northern and Western Europeans. Since the 1965 reforms, 76 million immigrants have come to the United States, almost 90 percent of them from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Miller has a clear message to the tens of millions of his fellow Americans with those origins: \u201cThe United States would be a far better country without you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, the people who pushed for the 1924 law had the same message for Jewish families like Miller\u2019s great-grandparents from Belarus: \u201cThe United States would be a far better country without you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miller is no ordinary presidential aide. He commands other Trump officials with the confidence that he is the first among them, as though he were Trump\u2019s \u201cprime minister,\u201d as Ezra Klein has suggested. Early in President Trump\u2019s second term, he played a central role in Trump\u2019s attack on universities; more recently, he has helped build a MAGA deep state with young staffers loyal to Trump replacing the federal employees fired by DOGE. As The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Nick Miroff put it in January when Miller\u2019s influence was at its height, Miller is \u201cthe pulsing human id of a president who is already almost pure id \u2026 an accelerant for the president\u2019s most incendiary impulses.\u201d<\/p>\n

The policies that Miller has been especially interested in accelerating concern America\u2019s racial makeup, most conspicuously by ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations. Miller coordinated the effort to get Congress to triple ICE\u2019s annual budget in Trump\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and he has pressed the agency to achieve the goal set in the legislation of a million deportations a year, which works out to about 3,000 a day.<\/p>\n

But that effort, which suffered a setback in late January when immigration agents\u2019 killing of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis cost the administration public support, is only the more visible part of Miller\u2019s anti-immigrant campaign. As the tweet about the 1965 immigration reforms indicated, his animus isn\u2019t directed just at illegal immigrants. He doesn\u2019t want many legal immigrants either, especially not if they\u2019re coming from the \u201cthird world.\u201d In January, the Trump administration suspended immigration visas for people from 75 countries, covering most of Africa and much of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe (including Belarus). It was the most significant step in 60 years to restore the pre-1965 limits on who can immigrate and become an American. The administration has also nearly shut down refugee resettlement, except for whites from South Africa.<\/p>\n

Mass deportations and immigration restriction are best thought of as just one half of an ethnonationalist agenda aimed at what might be called white replenishment<\/em>, the response of right-wingers to the racial replacement that they imagine the government has been pursuing. The other half consists of pronatalist policies. If unauthorized immigrants are deported or pressured to flee at the rate of a million a year while legal immigration is limited, the United States may have zero or even negative immigration; that is, more people leaving than settling in the country. In that case, the U.S. population will soon begin to age and shrink, because the birth rate is falling below the level needed to stay even. So Miller and other ethnonationalists want American women to have more babies, a cause for which Miller\u2019s wife has become an outspoken advocate.<\/p>\n

\u201cMake babies. Raise those babies,\u201d Katie Miller, formerly DOGE\u2019s communications director, urges other women. \u201cIt\u2019s our highest and best value.\u201d Just as in her husband\u2019s crusade against third world immigration, the racial dimension is never explicit. But she and others on the right think that conservative women are more likely than liberal women to have children, creating \u201ca partisan fertility gap\u201d that some speculate could give Republicans a long-term political advantage in the absence of immigration.<\/p>\n

White replenishment would be the reverse of what the sociologist Tom\u00e1s Jim\u00e9nez calls \u201cethnic replenishment.\u201d Jim\u00e9nez argues that ongoing immigration from Mexico has continually replenished the sense of a distinct ethnic identity among Mexican immigrants. Stop immigration, and you stop ethnic replenishment and likely encourage ethnic attrition, a decline in ethnic identification. That\u2019s what happened with many Southern and Eastern Europeans who, after the immigration cutoff in the 1920s, blended into the white mainstream after initially being seen as less than fully white.<\/p>\n

Borrowing from Jim\u00e9nez, I use \u201cwhite replenishment\u201d to refer to any process that \u201cwhitens\u201d the population, whether that results from deportations (or \u201cremigration,\u201d as some on the far right say), restriction of nonwhite immigration, pronatalist policies aimed predominantly at native-born whites, or a strengthening of white identification among people with mixed white-minority ancestries.<\/p>\n

Is white replenishment feasible? What would happen in an America guided by Stephen Miller\u2019s policies? I am not going to suggest those policies would be completely ineffectual in whitening the population. But they are a deadly prescription for the country, based on a hopeless quest to bring back a lost 1950s America as well as false assumptions about immigrants, race and culture, birth rates, and the economy.<\/p>\n

Forcing Immigrants Out, Blocking Others From Coming In<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Miller has been Trump\u2019s chief adviser on immigration since his 2016 campaign, but he has been able to act on a more complete anti-immigration agenda in Trump\u2019s second term. That agenda encompasses both forcing many current immigrants to leave and stopping prospective immigrants from arriving. Miller wants to bring about a historic reversal in America\u2019s demographic evolution.<\/p>\n

Despite all the conflict over immigration that Trump stirred in his first term, he brought about little lasting change. When he left office, he hadn\u2019t passed any major immigration legislation, and America had just as many unauthorized immigrants, around 10 to 11 million, as it had when he first became president. That was partly due to Trump\u2019s own chaotic inconsistency as well as resistance in Congress and from his law-abiding appointees at DHS.<\/p>\n

The Republican Congress elected with Trump in 2024 has been more amenable to Miller\u2019s agenda, and instead of just serving as an adviser, Miller now controls immigration policy, with only Trump above him. Before DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was fired in March, she reportedly said, \u201cEverything I\u2019ve done, I\u2019ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.\u201d<\/p>\n

The aggressive deportation strategy came from the top. Surging ICE into blue cities served more than one purpose, not just seizing the undocumented on the streets but intimidating others to self-deport and forcing Democratic officials to capitulate to Trump\u2019s masked agents. The choice of Minneapolis as a target was revealing: The city has a community of Somalis, whom Miller and Trump have singled out as objects of contempt. In late 2025, just before the surge began in January, Trump called the Somalis \u201cgarbage,\u201d while Miller called them thieves whose only industry in Africa had been piracy, which they had brought to the United States in the form of Medicaid and welfare fraud. Miller tied the Somalis to the Democrats, whom he accused of seeking to turn America into a \u201cversion of Somalia\u201d by carrying out policies based on \u201cthe two worst ideologies imaginable, communism and DEI.\u201d<\/p>\n

After community resistance turned the ICE surge in Minneapolis into a public relations debacle, Trump decided to pull back from highly visible confrontations for fear of midterm election losses. But while Noem and other top officials at DHS lost their jobs, Miller kept his, and although he has stepped back from running DHS, the administration\u2019s aims have not changed. For the remainder of Trump\u2019s term, ICE will have the new resources Congress has given it\u2014thousands of additional agents, a dozen warehouses converted into huge detention centers, a fleet of deportation aircraft. The new DHS secretary, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, has signaled a tactical shift toward more focused raids that achieve mass deportations efficiently without triggering public uproar.<\/p>\n

Miller has also been pushing another strategy: spurring immigrants to leave on their own by making life difficult for them. These tactics include denying immigrants commercial trucking licenses, health coverage, housing, and financial credit. The deaths and dangerous conditions at detention centers are well calculated to instill fear among deportable immigrants and to encourage them to flee before ICE shows up.<\/p>\n

The population at risk of being deported is considerable. In 2023, according to an estimate by the Pew Research Center, there were about 14 million unauthorized immigrants, or 27 percent of the foreign-born population. \u201cUnauthorized\u201d refers to immigrants with no legal protections (eight million) or with only precarious protections (six million). The latter include people seeking asylum but awaiting a date in immigration court; the Dreamers on Obama\u2019s program of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which the courts have not yet allowed Trump to end; others who have received \u201chumanitarian parole\u201d; and still others who have Temporary Protected Status.<\/p>\n

Since Trump\u2019s return to the presidency, he has revoked parole for about 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans and allowed Temporary Protected Status to expire for about 700,000 Venezuelans and Haitians. (The expulsion of the Haitians, however, may be overturned in the Supreme Court because of flagrant procedural violations.) Judges in immigration courts, which are part of the Justice Department, are being pressured to deny asylum; judges deemed too lenient are being purged, and only 10 percent of asylees have been winning their cases.<\/p>\n

In short, as long as Miller has anything to say about it, most immigrants in a precarious legal position have little chance of achieving secure status.<\/p>\n

MILLER\u2019S EFFORTS TO RESTRICT LEGAL IMMIGRATION<\/strong> get less attention than the mass deportations, but they are well calculated to stop the \u201cthird world\u201d from besieging Americans any further.<\/p>\n

In December, the administration suspended the Diversity Visa lottery, which for the previous three decades had brought about 55,000 immigrants a year from countries with low recent rates of immigration to the United States. Unsurprisingly for any program with \u201cdiversity\u201d in its name that\u2019s benefited many African immigrants, conservatives have long had it in their crosshairs. To shut it down, the Trump administration said the program raised public-safety concerns, citing one solitary case: a Portuguese immigrant, admitted to the country around 2000, who in 2025 murdered two students at Brown University and a professor at MIT.<\/p>\n

In January, the Trump administration used a different rationale for its suspension of immigration visas for people from 75 countries, claiming without evidence that people from those countries were at \u201chigh risk\u201d of relying on welfare benefits. In a separate measure in January, risks to national security were the grounds for denying nonimmigrant as well as immigrant visas for people from 19 countries, mostly in Africa and the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Although a future administration could reverse these measures, that will not be true of Trump\u2019s executive order on birthright citizenship if the Supreme Court sustains it. That order, suspended by lower courts, would deny citizenship to a child born in the United States if the mother\u2019s presence on American soil was unlawful or only temporarily lawful and the father was neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident. Based on the legal history of birthright citizenship and oral argument in the Supreme Court in April, most legal analysts expect the justices to overturn Trump\u2019s order. But in the weeks before the Court heard the birthright citizenship case, Miller prodded Republican state legislators from Texas to end public funding of K-12 education for undocumented children, which may have more chance of being upheld.<\/p>\n

A 1975 Texas law originally led to a Supreme Court decision in 1982 in Plyler v. Doe<\/em>, affirming children\u2019s right not to be denied K-12 education based on their legal status. In that case, the Court ruled that a state needed to have a \u201csubstantial\u201d interest to justify denying education to undocumented children, because the denial would impose \u201ca lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children \u2026 [who] can neither affect their parents\u2019 conduct nor their own undocumented status.\u201d The Court reasoned that states lacked a substantial interest because a class of illiterates would exacerbate \u201cthe problems and costs of unemployment, welfare, and crime.\u201d But that decision commanded only a bare 5-4 majority, and today\u2019s Court seems far less likely to impose the same requirement for public funding on the states.<\/p>\n

The loss of constitutional protection for the education of undocumented children would be a historic shift of enormous social consequence. It would likely lead many immigrant families to flee red states for blue states where their kids could get an education, or to self-deport if no state would educate them.<\/p>\n

What Negative Immigration Would Look Like<\/strong><\/h4>\n

How big an impact Miller\u2019s policies have had so far is unclear. Based on census data, the Pew Research Center estimates that from January to June 2025 the total immigrant population fell by 1.4 million, including some 750,000 workers. But Pew notes that the figures may reflect declining survey response rates by immigrants. That problem is likely to make all data tracking the immigrant population highly unreliable at a time when many immigrants feel threatened.<\/p>\n

In January, the Census Bureau reported a \u201chistoric decline\u201d in net immigration from 2.7 million in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025 and a projected 321,000 in 2026. The net immigration figures, however, are uncertain because the census does not track immigrants who return home permanently. Its forecast for 2026 was also only a guess because in January it didn\u2019t know all the measures the administration would adopt this year to curb legal immigration. An independent analysis of census data by a team at the Brookings Institution finds that immigration fell into negative territory in 2025 (between -10,000 and -295,000) and has continued to be negative in 2026.<\/p>\n

Thus far, the national impact of the immigration reversal has been limited. But if sustained over years at the level Miller hopes to reach, negative immigration would have large implications for every sphere of American life, from local communities to the national economy. Many of Trump\u2019s supporters may like the idea of reversing immigration more than its consequences for rural and small-town depopulation, aging and shrinkage of the workforce, economic growth, and the fiscal problems of the federal government, particularly Social Security and Medicare.<\/p>\n

Much of rural and small-town America\u2014Trump country\u2014has already been losing population. Two-thirds of counties have had more deaths than births. Schools and hospitals are under threat, and many have closed. Urban areas are not exempt from those problems; cities are struggling with school consolidation and closures. But the implications are more serious in rural areas, where the loss of the only school or only hospital in a community makes it a less desirable place to live, drives young families away, reduces real estate values, and furthers a self-reinforcing process of decline. Rural communities with rebounding populations tend to have one thing in common: new immigrants. Negative immigration will make it harder for rural community institutions to survive.<\/p>\n

Nationally, the economic implications of sustained negative immigration are going to be severe. Economic growth depends on two factors: the number of people working and their productivity. When the labor force stops increasing, the growth of the economy must come entirely from higher productivity. Trump\u2019s recent budget, as Paul Krugman points out, makes implausibly high assumptions about productivity increases to obscure its implications for the federal deficit.<\/p>\n

Read more How Gov. Spanberger Betrayed Virginia\u2019s Workers<\/a><\/p>\n

When Trump and Miller suggest that immigrants are leeches on welfare, they create a wholly false picture of their fiscal impact. Immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits, particularly in relation to Social Security and Medicare. One recent study estimates that from 1994 to 2023, immigrants generated a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion (in 2024 dollars) and that, without immigrants, the national debt would have risen to twice its current level.<\/p>\n

Besides requiring substantially higher taxation, sustained negative immigration would have other unpleasant ramifications for conservative business interests. In June 2025, Trump decided to call off ICE enforcement on worksites in two industries of special political or personal interest to him. In agriculture and hospitality, he said, immigrants are \u201cvery good, long time workers,\u201d so ICE should steer clear of them. The order then went out to stop enforcement at farms, meatpacking plants, and hotels (and, I imagine, golf courses).<\/p>\n

ICE raids on farms and orchards would probably be one of the most efficient ways of deporting the undocumented, but they would also leave crops rotting in the fields and raise inflation. Able-bodied, native-born workers aren\u2019t standing by willing to do backbreaking work at low wages. To relieve some shortages, Trump has authorized more short-term visas for seasonal farmworkers. This is what Trump and Miller are offering rural America: a fringe labor force of undocumented and temporary workers, powerless because they cannot vote, cannot organize, and are deportable the moment they make any trouble.<\/p>\n

In other industries, such as construction, nursing home care, and restaurants, mass deportations and immigration restriction are already causing labor shortages. If Miller succeeds in achieving negative immigration, he is going to have to do it at the expense of business interests dear to Trump and the Republican Party.<\/p>\n

But Miller isn\u2019t worried about the far-ranging consequences of the policies he is promoting because he believes history shows there is an alternative to immigration: more American babies. Immigration, he says, was \u201cnet negative\u201d and \u201call population growth was from family formation\u201d during \u201cthe last period in which America was the undisputed global superpower.\u201d Presumably, he\u2019s referring to the post\u2013World War II era. But while immigration was low then, it was net negative only for one year, from July 1954 to June 1955, when the Eisenhower administration deported hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from the Southwest.<\/p>\n

Miller is calling for an indefinite period of far greater negative immigration, which won\u2019t help the birth rate. Immigrants have higher birth rates than the native-born. Instead of stimulating family formation and raising the birth rate, mass deportations break up families and reduce the birth rate. But the problems with conservative pronatalism only begin there.<\/p>\n

The Empty Promise of Conservative Pronatalism<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Conservatives in recent years have been seized with worries about the falling birth rate, but they are ideologically incapable of doing much about it. Economic pressures constrain many people from having as many children as they might under more auspicious conditions. The costs of child care, health care, housing for a growing family, college, and forgone earnings during pregnancy and early childhood make raising kids today a daunting financial proposition. In Brigham Young University\u2019s last year, cost was the top reason people gave for \u201climiting the number of children [they] have had or plan to have.\u201d More than two-thirds of people disagreed with the statement that raising a child is \u201caffordable for most people.\u201d<\/p>\n

But conservatives are opposed to raising taxes or reorienting public spending to reduce those costs in any significant degree. Moreover, the last thing they want to do is to give poor women, particularly poor women of color, an incentive to have more children\u2014this has always been one of the main conservative criticisms of welfare. To avoid incentivizing the \u201cwrong\u201d people, conservative pronatalists have proposed aid for parents in the form of tax credits and child bonuses whose benefits are greater for families with higher incomes. In the end, though, the policy changes Republicans adopt when they are in office are just too small to affect the birth rate.<\/p>\n

The fate of pronatalist policy under Trump is instructive. During their 2024 campaign, Trump and JD Vance raised hopes among pronatalists that they would finally have an administration on their side. Trump said he would make in vitro fertilization free, and in 2025 he even proclaimed himself the \u201cfertilization president,\u201d but the main result has been minor discounts on fertility medications that are hardly likely to affect the nation\u2019s birth rate.<\/p>\n

His One Big Beautiful Bill did establish \u201cTrump accounts\u201d for newborns, a slimmed-down version of more ample, progressive proposals such as William Darity\u2019s \u201c.\u201d For children born between 2025 and 2028, the federal government will make a deposit of $1,000 into a private investment account that cannot be drawn upon until the child is 18 years old, ensuring that it won\u2019t help with the immediate costs of raising children. Even if the money could be withdrawn sooner, it\u2019s too small to make a difference in decisions about having children.<\/p>\n

Child care might have been a Trump cause. When Ivanka Trump advised her father during his first term, she proposed a program to support child care, but it wasn\u2019t his priority then, and it isn\u2019t his priority now. At an Easter lunch this year, he said: \u201cWe\u2019re fighting wars. We can\u2019t take care of day care.\u201d Public financing of child care never gets traction under Republicans in part because conservatives consider it unfair to traditional families with stay-at-home mothers. Meanwhile, cuts in federal funds are resulting in closures of child care centers and less food assistance for low-income families.<\/p>\n

The 1950s generation of stay-at-home mothers is the model for conservative pronatalists\u2019 vision of a new baby boom. But women of that era stayed home partly because of outright exclusion from educational opportunities, jobs, and careers. The standard of living of most families today depends on the earnings of women. Conservatives don\u2019t have a practical plan to turn American families back in time.<\/p>\n

Conservatives also aren\u2019t willing to impose regulations on corporations that would enable parents to reconcile work with raising children and give them more security. In today\u2019s age of precarity, many people in their twenties and thirties don\u2019t feel confident enough about their jobs or the economy to make long-term commitments to marriage and raising children.<\/p>\n

The post\u2013World War II U.S. economy supported the aspirations of working families in large part because of changes resulting from the New Deal. Americans in the 1950s benefited from two things that Trump and Miller show no interest in restoring: the highest rates of unionization and the most highly progressive tax system Americans have ever had. Incomes grew fast, and unlike today they grew faster at lower- and middle-income levels than among the rich. The GI Bill and expanded state support for education from K-12 to college created opportunities for upward mobility. After suffering through the Depression and war, Americans saw improvement in their lives. They had reasons for hope, and the children they had were an expression of that hope. Based on the history they had lived through, they expected that their children would have a better life and see a better world.<\/p>\n

Despite declining after the postwar baby boom, the birth rate climbed back near the population replacement level in the 1990s and early 2000s, another era of broadly rising incomes. One key measure, the \u201ctotal fertility rate,\u201d projects how many children women will have over their childbearing years, based on current birth rates among women of different ages. A total fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman keeps the population level. Since 2007, it has fallen below replacement, dropping to 1.57 projected births per woman in 2025.<\/p>\n

That projection hasn\u2019t yet kicked in: Last year, births still outnumbered deaths by about half a million, but according to a forecast by the Congressional Budget Office, deaths will exceed births by 2030, when the U.S. population will begin falling without net immigration. If net immigration turns negative before 2030 (which it may already have done), the population will fall sooner.<\/p>\n

One reason for the decline in the birth rate is a development we ought to celebrate. In the early 1990s, the high birth rate among teenagers was treated as a national crisis. Teens, people said, were unprepared to be mothers and were destroying their own chances for education and a better life. Thirty years later, the teen birth rate has fallen 72 percent, part of a wider tendency among American women to postpone childbirth into their late twenties and thirties. As birth rates have been falling at earlier ages, they have been rising at later ages. If that increase continues, the fall in the total fertility rate will prove to be less than today\u2019s projections indicate.<\/p>\n

But we shouldn\u2019t dismiss concerns about the birth rate. The difficulty that parents face in affording the costs of raising children ought to prompt public action. Although pronatalist policies in other countries have not been a notable success, some analysts attribute that to policies that typically don\u2019t come close to offsetting the true costs of raising a child or enable parents to balance work and family. The economist Nancy Folbre argues that everyone in a society benefits from the raising of the next generation, but the childless are free-riding on the parents that do make the investment. That\u2019s part of the justification for paid parental leave, public funding for child care, and other ways of relieving the economic pressures that prevent families from having the number of children they want to have. A serious commitment to a progressive alternative might achieve the results that more tentative policies haven\u2019t produced.<\/p>\n

Liberals and progressives are also not as alarmed as conservatives about the falling birth rate because they are comfortable with a policy that has demonstrably raised the birth rate: immigration. Not only do immigrants have a higher birth rate than the U.S-born; U.S. immigration law, with its emphasis on family unification, has directly supported families. If we want a higher birth rate, immigrants can help achieve that aim. Conservatives don\u2019t like that option because they are prioritizing another goal\u2014white replenishment.<\/p>\n

White Replenishment as National Self-Harm<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Since the reopening of immigration in 1965, the United States has been fortunate to attract some of the most energetic and talented people in the world. Prominent examples are not hard to find. Of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics since 2000, 40 percent have gone to immigrants. Of Fortune 500 companies, 46 percent were founded by immigrants or their children. Immigrants haven\u2019t just taken jobs\u2014they\u2019ve created them. Aspiring entrepreneurs have come to the United States because it has provided them opportunity and been more welcoming than other countries. That source of American renewal and vitality is endangered by Miller\u2019s exclusionary policies and his fanning of resentment against contemporary immigrants.<\/p>\n

Miller\u2019s appeal to resentment assumes that, unlike earlier mass immigration from Europe, the post-1965 wave has brought to America\u2019s shores foreigners without the ability to succeed or the interest in assimilating. But as extensive research has shown\u2014summed up in Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan\u2019s book Streets of Gold<\/em>\u2014the post-1965 immigrants have been as economically mobile and as quick to assimilate as their European forerunners. The United States has continued to excel at something it has been good at throughout its history: making Americans\u2014since 1965 making Americans out of the most diverse peoples any country has ever absorbed.<\/p>\n

Some economically driven resentment of immigrants is understandable. Real earnings for men without a college education have eroded, and immigrants make convenient scapegoats. In industries like and trades like roofing, employers have used immigrants to undercut unionized workers and slash wages and benefits. Many native-born workers infer from such experiences that they would be better off if Trump and Miller succeeded in cracking down on immigration.<\/p>\n

But if Trump and Miller have their way, workers won\u2019t get back the unions that once made those jobs high-paying jobs. Businesses that lose cheap immigrant labor have two other options besides raising wages. In some cases, they can move the work abroad; for example, companies will import fruits and vegetables that cannot be produced cheaply in the United States. In other cases, companies will substitute technology for human labor and invest in robots to do the jobs that immigrants have done. That\u2019s already happening. There are even robots for milking cows. If immigration is cut off and mass deportations deplete the labor force, investments in more automated work will increase.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s pronatalism has been for show, but his nativism has been for real. The combination won\u2019t enable Americans to time-travel back to the 1950s; it will produce a country with fewer babies and more robots.<\/p>\n

Liberals and progressives bear some responsibility for creating the panic about immigration that helped put Trump back in power. As I previously wrote in these pages, President Biden squandered Americans\u2019 goodwill toward immigrants by allowing a border crisis to develop that supported Trump\u2019s case against immigration. For a long time, liberals and progressives also hadn\u2019t done their own cause any favors by proclaiming the demographic inevitability of a \u201cmajority minority\u201d society in which whites would become a minority group.<\/p>\n

The notion that whites are about to become a minority has been deeply misleading. Such forecasts reflect the dubious assumption that the many Hispanics who see themselves as white are victims of a kind of false consciousness. The forecasts make the even more dubious choice of treating all future descendants of Hispanics as nonwhite, despite high rates of intermarriage with Anglos and strong tendencies in later generations to identify as white. As survey data shows, the majority of Hispanics today do not see themselves as \u201cpeople of color.\u201d The Census Bureau has contributed to the illusion of a collapse of the white population. By adopting a racial recoding algorithm and other changes in 2020, it reclassified about 7 percent of the white-identifying population as multiracial, prompting stories in the media about a precipitous white decline.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s not my argument that Stephen Miller\u2019s America is impossible because whites will inevitably lose their majority status. Even with significant immigration, whites will continue to be the majority. Miller\u2019s immigration policies might result in some white replenishment; more Hispanics will likely identify as white if Latin American immigration is cut off.<\/p>\n

But the United States is long past the point where it can succeed on Miller\u2019s assumptions. It cannot be run on the premise that the millions of Americans with origins in the \u201cthird world\u201d are culturally alien and economically burdensome. That is a dangerous and demeaning lie.<\/p>\n

In 1952, after Congress revised the immigration laws but left in place the national origin quotas that discriminated against Southern and Eastern European Catholics and Jews, President Harry Truman said in his veto message that it was \u201cincredible\u201d to him that \u201cwe should again be enacting into law such a slur on the patriotism, the capacity, and the decency of a large part of our citizenry.\u201d Although Congress overrode that veto, Truman\u2019s view prevailed when Congress eliminated the national origin quotas in 1965.<\/p>\n

Miller\u2019s policies are a slur on the patriotism, capacity, and decency of a large part of our citizenry today. Those slurs are implicit in the wholesale exclusions of people from the countries he calls the third world. The explicit slurs that regularly come out of the mouths of Trump and Miller are unambiguously demeaning. They incite racial hatred and threaten the ability of Americans to live together in mutual respect.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Americans are rejecting Trump and Miller\u2019s path. According to Gallup, public support for immigration is back up to the level it reached before Biden\u2019s policies squandered Americans\u2019 goodwill. Trump and Miller misread the 2024 election. Americans do not want their government to wage war against their neighbors.<\/p>\n

Concern about the birth rate is not a bad thing. We ought to use that concern to demand policies that would enable families to have the children they want to have. Mostly, though, what Americans need is something they have had before\u2014hope grounded in reality. Hope for a better life. Hope for a government that works for them. If Americans had more hope, they would have more children. And if they had that hope, there might not be as much anxiety about the race those children might be.<\/p>\n

Read more Learn to Code, They Said<\/a><\/p>\n

This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n


\n
\n
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Stephen Miller\u2019s policies are a deadly prescription for the country, based on a hopeless quest to bring back a lost 1950s America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":80,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[39],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-tagged-birth-rate-conservatism-donald-trump-economic-policy-ice-immigration-politics-race-ethnicity-stephen-miller"],"yoast_head":"\nStephen Miller\u2019s Impossible America - Frontier Housing Report<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=81\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Stephen Miller\u2019s Impossible America - 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