STEPHEN MILLER’S INSUFFERABLE UNCLE:

Politico has published a opinion piece by David Glosser called “Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.” Glosser’s piece is a shrill, hyper-personal rant of the “Give me your tired, your poor” genre. But for Glosser’s status as Stephen Miller’s uncle, I don’t think Politico would even have considered running it.

Glosser’s great-grandfather came to America from what was then Russia and now is Belarus (my father’s father also came here from there). Glosser’s thesis is that if Trump administration immigration policies, which Miller helped craft, had been in effect in the early 20th century, Miller’s forebears (and Glosser’s) would not have been able to immigrate to the U.S. Instead, they would have been wiped out by German Nazis. Therefore, Miller is a hypocrite for pushing these policies.

Glosser makes no real effort to support his claim that Trump’s policy would have stranded his great-grandfather in Belarus. Trump has not ended the taking in of refugees. Rather, he has cut the number of refugees admitted per year in about half — down to 45,000 per year — with further cuts a possibility.

Would Jews facing pogroms in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, and Jews threatened by Nazism 30 years later, have been among those excluded under a Trump-like refugee policy implemented back then? There’s no way to say for sure, but I think it’s unlikely they would have been. Nor does Glosser engage this question.

The analogy further disintegrates with the story that the left-leaning Tablet ran in April: “While [FDR] was uncertain about whether [Jewish refugees] would be better off on the slopes of the Andes or the savannahs of central Africa, there was one place he knew he didn’t want them: the United States of America.”