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Stephen
Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.
If my
nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would
have been wiped out.
By DAVID S. GLOSSER August 13, 2018
Dr. David S. Glosser is a retired neuropsychologist:
formerly a member of the Neurology faculties of Boston University School of
Medicine and Jefferson Medical College.
Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain
migration.
It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor
shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now
Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription
in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a
village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in
America.
He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to
his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no
English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and
sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts
and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included
young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city
of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other
hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling
goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by
Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores
run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my
dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and
employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five
decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a
prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most
important, American citizens.
What does this classically American tale have to do with
Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s
mother, Miriam, is my sister.
I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my
nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the
architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our
family’s life in this country.
I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the
Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the
radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents,
and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect
when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the
U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America first”
nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib
waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all
but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen
to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose
support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate
for him.
Like other immigrants, our family’s welcome to the USA was
not always a warm one, but we largely had the protection of the law, there was
no state-sponsored violence against us, no kidnapping of our male children, and
we enjoyed good relations with our neighbors. True, Jews were excluded from
many occupations, couldn’t buy homes in some towns, couldn’t join certain
organizations or attend certain schools or universities, but life was good. As
in past generations, there were hate mongers who regarded the most recent
groups of poor immigrants as scum, rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists,
but largely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the
American dream. Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This
was the miracle of America.
Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics,
Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind
to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions. After all, Stephen’s is not the
only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration. Trump's
grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the run from military
conscription to a new life in the United States, and his mother fled the
poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City.
(Trump’s in-laws just became citizens on the strength of his wife’s own
citizenship.)
These facts are important not only for their grim historical
irony but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not
the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump. When confronted by the deaths and
suffering of thousands, our senses are overwhelmed, and the victims become
statistics rather than people. I meet these statistics one at a time through my
volunteer service as a neuropsychologist for the Philadelphia affiliate of HIAS
(formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the global nonprofit that protects
refugees and helped my family more than 100 years ago. I will share the story
of one such man I have met in the hopes that my nephew might recognize elements
of our shared heritage.
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