Trump aide Stephen Miller, meet your great-grandfather, who flunked his naturalization test
,
Stephen
Miller with the document denying citizenship to his great-grandfather,
Nison Miller. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP, background
Getty Images)
A
photo of Nison (aka Max) Miller stares out from the screen, sullen and
stern, in faded black and white. “Order of Court Denying Petition” is
the title of the government form dated “14th November 1932,” to which it is attached, the one in which Miller is applying for naturalization as an American citizen.
And beneath the photo, the reason given for his denial: Ignorance.
Nison
Miller is the great-grandfather of White House adviser Stephen Miller,
who has taken credit for being one of the chief architects of the
administration’s family separation policy. And this 85-year-old document
is just one bit of ammunition in a campaign being waged by the
unofficial band that goes by the hashtag #Resistance Genealogy.
Believing
that the past is prologue, they search online archives for nuggets
about the ancestors of public figures and politicians who disparage
today’s immigrants. They use tools they developed as a personal hobby to
make the point that people like Miller are holding newcomers to a
standard that their own forebears could not meet.
“Unless
your ancestors came on a slave ship or you’re Native American,” you
came here as an immigrant, says Jennifer Mendelsohn, who created the
#resistancegenealogy hashtag last summer after Republican congressman
Steve King or Iowa was quoted as saying “We can’t restore our
civilization with somebody else’s babies.” So she went on a genealogy
website and quickly documented that King’s own grandmother was one such
baby, arriving in 1894 from Germany as a 4-year-old, along with her
infant siblings.
(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
“The
point isn’t to play ‘gotcha,’” says Renee Stern Steinig, a former
president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Long Island, who first
found the Miller naturalization application last summer. “It’s to show
that we are a nation of immigrants, and you are here because someone
else picked up and came here for a better life.” In fact, she is careful
to point out that Miller’s great-grandfather being labeled “Ignorant”
on that application was probably because he slipped up on a few
questions on his citizenship test, not because he was in fact stupid or
unworthy of being a citizen — an example of the same harsh, presumptive
judgment that she believes is being used against today’s immigrants.
Eventually he retook the test and became a citizen.
Another
part of Stephen Miller’s family tree seems to have been the first
skirmish on this genealogical battlefield. During the summer of 2016,
before Steinig found great-granddad Nison, Rob Eshman of the Jewish Journal
became intrigued by the apparent hypocrisy of Miller’s description of
himself as a grandchild of Jewish refugees while portraying today’s
immigrants as dangerous. He reached out to attorney E. Randol
Schoenberg, who had famously won the case forcing the Austrian
government to return a valuable painting by Gustav Klimt to the Jewish
family from whom it had been stolen by the Nazis — the story that was
the basis of the 2015 film “Woman in Gold.” Schoenberg has developed an
expertise in tracing family histories.
Together
he and Eshman followed Miller’s mother’s side (great-grandpa Max was on
his father’s side) back to Wolf Lieb Glotzer and his wife, Bessie. That
couple arrived from Belarus in 1903 with $8 to their name, escaping
anti-Semitic pogroms. In an instance of what today would be called chain
migration, they were joined by their son Natan and Wolf’s brother
Moses, and eventually by another brother, Sam, who changed his name to
Glosser. Sam Glosser was the maternal great-grandfather of Stephen
Miller.
Eshman’s
article laid out the story, concluding that “Miller demonstrates that
in America, truly anything is possible: The great-grandson of a
desperate refugee can grow up to shill for the demagogue bent on keeping
desperate refugees like his great-grandfather out.”
Eshman
went on to pose, and then refute, what has become the most familiar
objection to these stories, writing: “But it’s different now, you say.
Miller’s forebears came here legally…” It is an argument that Megan
Smolenyak, a former chief family historian and spokesperson for
Ancestry.com and a regular contributor to the TV series “Who Do You
Think You Are?” hears regularly. “It’s a glib, easy response,” she says,
“but it ignores history.”
Essentially all immigration was legal in America for its first 300 years, so yes, everyone who came during those centuries came here legally.
Until the early 1920s, all people needed to do to move here was walk
off a ship and prove they were basically sane and free of obvious
communicable diseases. Had today’s existing and proposed rules been in
effect back then, she says, a high percentage of the ancestors of
current citizens would never have been admitted.
In addition, she says, many who think their ancestors entered completely legally are wrong.
Fox contributor Tomi Lahren — who tweeted last year, “We are indeed a
nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of laws. Respect our laws and
we welcome you. If not, bye” — didn’t know that her great-great-great
grandfather had been indicted for forging his naturalization papers
until Mendelsohn tweeted that information back to her.
(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
And
Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the Republican chair of the House
Judiciary Committee, whose website states “I do not support a special
pathway to citizenship that rewards those who have broken our
immigration laws,” seems not to have known that his grandfather had lied
during his naturalization process, but was permitted citizenship
nonetheless, until Smolenyak found his naturalization papers.
Most
interesting to Smolenyak is that this research “is so easy. You don’t
have to go very far back.” It’s startling, she says, “how many of the
people who are virulently anti-immigration are children or grandchildren
or great-grandchildren of immigrants. We should have to work a lot
harder for these stories, but there they are, on the lowest, easiest
branches.”
She
originally expected that such views would be held by people whose
stories go further back on the American timeline, but former
presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and his daughter, White House press
secretary Sarah Sanders, whose roots begin in the 1600s, are the
exception. “Most of the rest of the time you think you’re going to have
to really dig in and go very far back, you don’t,” she says. “Why are
the children and grandchildren of immigrants so eager to keep immigrants
out?”
It’s
the desire to make that point — “to point out to people who are being
needlessly mean and spreading misinformation that they are conveniently
forgetting their own family, which in turn means forgetting our national
commonality” — that keeps Smolenyak and others in this fight.
It’s
why, when Miller said earlier this year that “we favor immigrants who
speak English,” Mendelsohn responded with evidence that four years after
Miller’s great-grandmother arrived in the U.S. in 1894 she was still
speaking Yiddish.
(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
And
when Fox host Tucker Carlson asked, “Why does America benefit from
having tons of people from failing countries come here?”, Mendelsohn
found a memoir from Carlson’s great-grandfather talking about how he
left the poverty of Italy for the promise of America.
(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
Or
when White House aide Dan Scavino vowed to end “chain migration,”
Mendelsohn tweeted: “So Dan. Let’s say Victor Scavino arrives from
Canelli, Italy in 1904, then brother Hector in 1905, brother Gildo in
1912, sister Esther in 1913, & sister Clotilde and their father
Giuseppe in 1916, and they live together in NY. Do you think that would
count as chain migration?”
(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
Or
when Lahren recently said, “You don’t just come into this country with
low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into
our country because someone says it makes them feel nice. That’s not
what this country is based on,” Mendelsohn parried on Twitter with:
“Except the 1930 census says Tomi’s 3x great-grandmother had been here
for 41 years and still spoke German. Her 2nd great-grandmother had been
here for 10 yrs. Spoke no English.”
(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
Ditto
for when White House chief of staff John Kelly said on NPR that today’s
immigrants are “not people that would easily assimilate into the United
States, into our modern society,” because they are uneducated, come
from rural areas, and “don’t speak English.” Mendelsohn posted
screenshots of documents showing all those things were also true of
Kelly’s maternal ancestors.
(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
With
every flurry of immigration policy uproar comes a spike in interest in
the #resistancegenealogy hashtag. So much research has been done at this
point, that often the most active participants merely resurface earlier
findings.
When
Stephen Miller told the New York Times that the decision to begin
separating children from their parents at the border was “simple” (in an
interview he gave during what happens to be Immigrant Heritage Month in
the U.S.), Steinig’s post about his great-grandfather’s naturalization
problems found new life on Twitter.
Or when Goodlatte proposed legislation that would stop the separation of families but still detain children, telling NPR “It’s very important that people coming to this country not try to enter the country illegally,” Smolenyak reposted her story about his grandfather’s naturalization untruths.
This might look like “weaponizing genealogy” Smolenyak says, but in fact she believes it is just the opposite.
“The
point is our commonality,” she says, “a reminder that this is
everyone’s family.” Donald Trump’s grandfather, she noted, came here in
part to avoid the draft in his native Bavaria while “his mother came
here as a servant. Imagine if they tried to come today.”
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