Stephen Miller’s ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903. That’s when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser disembarked at Ellis Island after leaving behind his hometown in Antopol, a small town in the part of the czarist Russian empire that is now Belarus. Wolf Laib, who was fleeing a life marked by anti-Jewish pogroms and forced conscription, quickly set about trying to raise more money to bring over relatives.

“Wolf Laib found work in New York City peddling bananas and other fruit on street corners, and began sending small sums of money back to the family,” reads an unpublished book about the family that one of Stephen Miller’s relatives shared with The New Republic. The book—which tells the story of some of Miller’s ancestors’ immigration to the United States and their subsequent thriving here—was written by Miller’s grandmother, Ruth Glosser. Now that Miller has accumulated such extraordinary power over the future of our immigration system, it’s worth turning to this remarkable document, which we’re making available online for the first time.

As the book recounts, Wolf Laib managed to bring over more family members in 1906, including a son, Sam Glosser. Over time, Wolf Laib—Miller’s great-great-grandfather—and his descendants built a successful haberdashery business in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which evolved into a chain of supermarkets and department stores. Sam Glosser’s American-born son, Izzy, had two American children, David and Miriam Glosser—who were to become the uncle and mother of Stephen Miller.

This story, of course, tracks with that of countless others who arrived in the United States as part of the great migration, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, between the 1880s and the 1910s, which numbered as high as 20 million. As the book notes, they were out to “escape economic hardships and religious persecution” to build a “better life for themselves and their children.”

At the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race.

Yet at the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race—it was rooted in the “scientific racism” of the day. But it also involved a somewhat different claim: that the new arrivals suffered from a “social degeneracy” or “social inadequacy”—two typical phrases at the time—which rendered them a threat to the “civilization” the United States was in the process of becoming. In this telling, as prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross declared in a 1914 broadside, these new immigrants were inferior to Americans who descended from the “pioneer breed” who’d given birth to the American nation. The new arrivals, Ross said, had “submerged” that ancestral connection to the “pioneer breed,” setting the nation on a path to the “extinction that surely awaits it.”

“There is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World,” declared one congressman not long after. As historian Gary Gerstle, author of the great book American Crucible, noted in an email to me, many nativists at the time lamented the “civilizational vulnerability” of the United States, believing that “white, Christian, and western European culture” stretching back to “ancient Greece and Rome” represented the “summit of human achievement” and the core of American civilization. This was under dire threat from “groups outside that culture” who were “unassimilable, with Jewish ranks full of Bolsheviks and Italian ranks full of anarchists.”

More than a century later, those diatribes about people like Miller’s ancestors are very similar to claims Miller makes today about the threat to “civilization” supposedly posed by those emigrating from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. To be sure, it is not a new move to bring up Miller’s ancestry in the context of his current nativism, and many aspects of Miller’s worldview are well-known in a scattershot way: his disdain for multiculturalism, his hatred of mass migration, his affinity with white nationalists.

But in a series of tweets, interviews in right-wing media, and statements made elsewhere, Miller has outlined something more comprehensive and sinister—an elaborate worldview that has escaped notice in the mainstream media. It centers immigrants as a threat to “civilization” in terms that echo the rhetoric of those determined to exclude people like his ancestors.

That larger worldview—and its intellectual roots—deserve more scrutiny. Given Miller’s extraordinary power—his near unfettered control over President Donald Trump’s massive ramp-up in immigration enforcement—a deeper understanding of Miller’s views is essential. It demonstrates in a more vivid way the true extremism of his anti-immigrant project—and why it poses a serious threat to the country and its future.

In that book about Miller’s ancestors, titled A Precious Legacy, there are wrenching passages about the Immigration Act of 1924. That law, which represented the culmination of all those aforementioned virulent sentiments about Southern and Eastern Europeans, adopted an immigration formula tied to the 1890 distribution of ethnicities in the United States. This guaranteed that most of the 150,000 immigrants allowed entry each year would henceforth come from Northern and Western Europe, imposing tighter limits on those from Southern and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The law’s primary aim was to slam the breaks on immigration by people like Miller’s ancestors.

Thanks to the 1924 act, the book notes, “the doors to free and open immigration here swung shut.” Fortunately, all of Wolf Laib’s immediate family made it to the United States by 1920, the book says, but many left behind did not fare well. “Those Jews who remained in Antopol were not so lucky,” ruefully recounts the book, which was first discussed in Hatemonger by journalist Jean Guerrero. It adds that most of those who remained in Wolf Laib’s town “were murdered by the Nazis.”

Strikingly, Stephen Miller has spoken positively about the 1924 law. “During the last period in which America was the undisputed global superpower—financially, culturally, militarily—immigration was net negative,” Miller tweeted in August. He’s referring to the period between the 1924 law and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended ethnic quotas for immigration created in 1924: In short, Miller is extolling the impacts of the 1924 measure. He was even more direct in 2015 emails to Breitbart obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He repeatedly praised President Calvin Coolidge for signing that law, describing the act rhapsodically as Coolidge’s “heritage” and suggesting the country should act “like Coolidge did”; that is, either dramatically restrict immigration or impose new ethnic quotas on it.

None of this necessarily means Miller is unconcerned about the fate of those who met terrible ends due to their inability to immigrate. But Miller offered those quotes about that century-old law as a device to describe his present-day vision, and, in a very real sense, his true ideological project is to unmake the world the 1965 act created when it ended the ethnic quota system and opened the country to more immigration from all over the world.

Indeed, Miller’s grander aims are best understood as an effort to destroy the entire architecture of immigration and humanitarian resettlement put in place in the post–World War II era. The 1965 law’s end to ethnic quotas guaranteed that, henceforth, immigration slots would be........

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