This article appears in the June 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
Last New Year’s 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 “America After 100 Million Deportations,” and above the image was a caption, “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.”
This fantasy scenario, the removal of more than a quarter of the U.S. population, didn’t come from a random online troll. It was posted on X by the official feed of the federal agency charged with immigration enforcement.
The driving force behind the Trump administration’s efforts to stop the “third world” from “besieging” the United States is Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. Just four days before the post by DHS, Miller himself had tweeted another fantasy: “Someone 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—but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for sixty years.”
There’s that euphemism “third world” again, so much more discreet than the explicitly racial terms Miller’s 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: “The United States would be a far better country without you.”
Of course, the people who pushed for the 1924 law had the same message for Jewish families like Miller’s great-grandparents from Belarus: “The United States would be a far better country without you.”
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’s “prime minister,” as Ezra Klein has suggested. Early in President Trump’s second term, he played a central role in Trump’s 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’s Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Nick Miroff put it in January when Miller’s influence was at its height, Miller is “the pulsing human id of a president who is already almost pure id … an accelerant for the president’s most incendiary impulses.”
The policies that Miller has been especially interested in accelerating concern America’s 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’s annual budget in Trump’s 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.
Stephen Miller’s policies are a deadly prescription for the country, based on a hopeless quest to bring back a lost 1950s America.
But that effort, which suffered a setback in late January when immigration agents’ killing of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis cost the administration public support, is only the more visible part of Miller’s anti-immigrant campaign. As the tweet about the 1965 immigration reforms indicated, his animus isn’t directed just at illegal immigrants. He doesn’t want many legal immigrants either, especially not if they’re coming from the “third world.” 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.
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, 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’s wife has become an outspoken advocate.
“Make babies. Raise those babies,” Katie Miller, formerly DOGE’s communications director, urges other women. “It’s our highest and best value.” Just as in her husband’s 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 “a partisan fertility gap” that some speculate could give Republicans a long-term political advantage in the absence of immigration.
White replenishment would be the reverse of what the sociologist Tomás Jiménez calls “ethnic replenishment.” Jiménez 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’s 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.
Borrowing from Jiménez, I use “white replenishment” to refer to any process that “whitens” the population, whether that results from deportations (or “remigration,” 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.
Is white replenishment feasible? What would happen in an America guided by Stephen Miller’s 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.
Forcing Immigrants Out, Blocking Others From Coming In
Miller has been Trump’s chief adviser on immigration since his 2016 campaign, but he has been able to act on a more complete anti-immigration agenda in Trump’s 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’s demographic evolution.
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’t 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’s own chaotic inconsistency as well as resistance in Congress and from his law-abiding appointees at DHS.
The Republican Congress elected with Trump in 2024 has been more amenable to Miller’s 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, “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.”
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’s 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 “garbage,” 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 “version of Somalia” by carrying out policies based on “the two worst ideologies imaginable, communism and DEI.”
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’s aims have not changed. For the remainder of Trump’s term, ICE will have the new resources Congress has given it—thousands 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.
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.
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. “Unauthorized” 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’s program of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which the courts have not yet allowed Trump to end; others who have received “humanitarian parole”; and still others who have Temporary Protected Status.
Since Trump’s 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.
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.
MILLER’S EFFORTS TO RESTRICT LEGAL IMMIGRATION get less attention than the mass deportations, but they are well calculated to stop the “third world” from besieging Americans any further.
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 “diversity” in its name that’s 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.
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 “high risk” 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.
Although a future administration could reverse these measures, that will not be true of Trump’s 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’s 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’s 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.
A 1975 Texas law originally led to a Supreme Court decision in 1982 in Plyler v. Doe, affirming children’s 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 “substantial” interest to justify denying education to undocumented children, because the denial would impose “a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children … [who] can neither affect their parents’ conduct nor their own undocumented status.” The Court reasoned that states lacked a substantial interest because a class of illiterates would exacerbate “the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare, and crime.” But that decision commanded only a bare 5-4 majority, and today’s Court seems far less likely to impose the same requirement for public funding on the states.
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.
What Negative Immigration Would Look Like
How big an impact Miller’s 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.
In January, the Census Bureau reported a “historic decline” 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’t 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.
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’s 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.
Much of rural and small-town America—Trump country—has 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.
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’s recent budget, as Paul Krugman points out, makes implausibly high assumptions about productivity increases to obscure its implications for the federal deficit.
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.
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 “very good, long time workers,” 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).
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’t 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.
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.
But Miller isn’t 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 “net negative” and “all population growth was from family formation” during “the last period in which America was the undisputed global superpower.” Presumably, he’s referring to the post–World 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.
Miller is calling for an indefinite period of far greater negative immigration, which won’t 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.
The Empty Promise of Conservative Pronatalism
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’s American Family Survey last year, cost was the top reason people gave for “limiting the number of children [they] have had or plan to have.” More than two-thirds of people disagreed with the statement that raising a child is “affordable for most people.”
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—this has always been one of the main conservative criticisms of welfare. To avoid incentivizing the “wrong” 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.
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 “fertilization president,” but the main result has been minor discounts on fertility medications that are hardly likely to affect the nation’s birth rate.
His One Big Beautiful Bill did establish “Trump accounts” for newborns, a slimmed-down version of more ample, progressive proposals such as William Darity’s “baby bonds.” 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’t help with the immediate costs of raising children. Even if the money could be withdrawn sooner, it’s too small to make a difference in decisions about having children.
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’t his priority then, and it isn’t his priority now. At an Easter lunch this year, he said: “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.” 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.
If sustained over years at the level Miller hopes to reach, negative immigration would have large implications for every sphere of American life.
The 1950s generation of stay-at-home mothers is the model for conservative pronatalists’ 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’t have a practical plan to turn American families back in time.
Conservatives also aren’t willing to impose regulations on corporations that would enable parents to reconcile work with raising children and give them more security. In today’s age of precarity, many people in their twenties and thirties don’t feel confident enough about their jobs or the economy to make long-term commitments to marriage and raising children.
The post–World 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.
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 “total fertility rate,” 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.
That projection hasn’t 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.
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’s projections indicate.
But we shouldn’t 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’t 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’s 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’t produced.
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’t like that option because they are prioritizing another goal—white replenishment.
White Replenishment as National Self-Harm
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’t just taken jobs—they’ve 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’s exclusionary policies and his fanning of resentment against contemporary immigrants.
Miller’s appeal to resentment assumes that, unlike earlier mass immigration from Europe, the post-1965 wave has brought to America’s shores foreigners without the ability to succeed or the interest in assimilating. But as extensive research has shown—summed up in Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan’s book Streets of Gold—the 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—since 1965 making Americans out of the most diverse peoples any country has ever absorbed.
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 meatpacking 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.
But if Trump and Miller have their way, workers won’t 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’s 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.
Trump’s pronatalism has been for show, but his nativism has been for real. The combination won’t enable Americans to time-travel back to the 1950s; it will produce a country with fewer babies and more robots.
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’ goodwill toward immigrants by allowing a border crisis to develop that supported Trump’s case against immigration. For a long time, liberals and progressives also hadn’t done their own cause any favors by proclaiming the demographic inevitability of a “majority minority” society in which whites would become a minority group.
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 “people of color.” 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.
So it’s not my argument that Stephen Miller’s America is impossible because whites will inevitably lose their majority status. Even with significant immigration, whites will continue to be the majority. Miller’s immigration policies might result in some white replenishment; more Hispanics will likely identify as white if Latin American immigration is cut off.
But the United States is long past the point where it can succeed on Miller’s assumptions. It cannot be run on the premise that the millions of Americans with origins in the “third world” are culturally alien and economically burdensome. That is a dangerous and demeaning lie.
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 “incredible” to him that “we should again be enacting into law such a slur on the patriotism, the capacity, and the decency of a large part of our citizenry.” Although Congress overrode that veto, Truman’s view prevailed when Congress eliminated the national origin quotas in 1965.
Miller’s 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.
Fortunately, Americans are rejecting Trump and Miller’s path. According to Gallup, public support for immigration is back up to the level it reached before Biden’s policies squandered Americans’ goodwill. Trump and Miller misread the 2024 election. Americans do not want their government to wage war against their neighbors.
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—hope 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.
This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.
