On Immigration, Stephen Miller Is no Calvin Coolidge

President Donald Trump, during his December 2 cabinet meeting, spewed among the most hateful remarks publicly uttered by a president, certainly in modern times.

Referring to Somali immigrants and the Somali-American congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Trump raged, “I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country … We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage; she’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work. These aren’t people that say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain.”

A week prior, in reaction to the shooting of two National Guard members by an Afghan immigrant, the Wall Street Journal editorial board rejected blaming all Afghan immigrants for the actions of one man. The policy architect of Trump’s mass deportation program, Stephen Miller, the obsessively anti-immigrant homeland security advisor, responded on X, “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

These bigoted statements would not have been embraced by the president Miller cites as an inspiration: Calvin Coolidge.

Full disclosure: I was recently appointed president of the committee that oversees the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum, which is located near my home in Northampton, Massachusetts. (Please visit!) And while I am speaking for myself only here, I aim to fulfill our museum’s mission of providing objective information about the 30th president and his times.

Miller’s love of Coolidge is evidenced by a series of emails sent to Katie McHugh in 2015 and 2016, when she worked for Breitbart, and he worked for Senator Jeff Sessions before he became Donald Trump’s first Attorney General. McHugh was fired by Breitbart 2017 for racist social media posts. But in 2019, she leaked the emails to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and gave interviews in which she said she no longer subscribed to “white nationalist, white supremacist” views and Miller—who by then had joined the first Trump administration—was a “white supremacist” and that he had functioned as a Breitbart editor while he worked for Sen. Sessions.

In one email thread, Miller responds to a colleague who said: “[Conservative radio host] Mark Levin just said there should be no immigration for several years. Not just cut the number down from the current 1 million green cards per year. For assimilation purposes.” Miller chimes in, “Like Coolidge did.”

In another email, Miller proposes to “expose that ridiculous statue of liberty [sic] myth” about the famous pro-immigrant poem enshrined on the statue’s pedestal that welcomed millions of migrants processed on Ellis Island. But to Miller, “two decades after [the] poem was added, Coolidge shut down immigration. No one said he was violating the Statue of Liberty’s purpose.”

Miller’s emails mock “diversity” as a “national religion. A news story about 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush speaking Spanish is a disturbing sign of “new English.” He recommends the novel Camp of the Saints—a story of French whites being overrun by Indian immigrants who eat human feces, which has been embraced by white nationalists as a cautionary tale. The Duke Law School graduate shares an article from the white nationalist website VDARE to warn about the possibility of Mexican hurricane victims migrating to America and receiving Temporary Protected Status.

White nationalists have embraced Coolidge for signing the restrictionist Immigration Act of 1924, indefinitely extending and tightening a temporary quota system based on national origins, structured to clamp down on Eastern and Southern European migration associated with anarchy, socialism, and—during the Prohibition Era—alcohol. Much of the anti-immigrant hysteria of the time stemmed from political violence waged by anarchists, including the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by the son of Polish immigrants, and the wave of bombings tied to an Italian immigrant group. And fear of the spread of Communism following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia tarred Jewish immigrants who supported socialism. During congressional deliberations over the immigration bill, Representative Jasper Tincher of Kansas framed the debate as “On the one side— is beer, Bolshevism, unassimilating settlements, and many flags. On the other side is constitutional government, one flag, the Stars and Stripes, and American institutions.”

The law also flatly banned nearly all immigration from Asia. The national-origin-based quota system remained in place for 41 years, slashing the share of America’s foreign-born population by more than half.

Also, as Vice President in 1921, Coolidge made eugenic remarks—common for the time—on race in defense of immigration restrictions, in a 1921 Good Housekeeping article: “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With our races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”

But reducing Coolidge’s views on immigration to those two data points—as, in modern times, both supportive white nationalists and critical progressives tend to do—oversimplifies the record. As president, Coolidge did not flog the eugenical statements from his 1921 article, but he did laud immigrants who embraced American ideals.

Addressing veterans of the Great War at the 1925 American Legion Convention in Omaha, Coolidge praised the diversity that Miller fears:

The bringing together of all these different national, racial, religious, and cultural elements has made our country a kind of composite of the rest of the world, and we can render no greater service than by demonstrating the possibility of harmonious cooperation among so many various groups. Every one of them has something characteristic and significant of great value to cast into the common fund of our material, intellectual, and spiritual resources. The war brought a great test of our experiment in amalgamating these varied factors into a real Nation, with the ideals and aspirations of a united people. None was excepted from the obligation to serve when the hour of danger struck…

Well-nigh all the races, religions, and nationalities of the world were represented in the armed forces of this Nation, as they were in the body of our population. No man’s patriotism was impugned or service questioned because of his racial origin, his political opinion, or his religious convictions. Immigrants and sons of immigrants from the central European countries fought side by side with those who descended from the countries which were our allies; with the sons of equatorial Africa; and with the Red men of our own aboriginal population, all of them equally proud of the name Americans.

We must not, in times of peace, permit ourselves to lose any part from this structure of patriotic unity… Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.

One month earlier, Coolidge spoke at a ceremony laying the cornerstone for Washington, D.C.’s Jewish Community Center, which still stands near Dupont Circle. Coolidge celebrated the Jewish contributions to the founding of America and, more broadly, the blessings of diversity:

If our experiment in free institutions has proved anything, it is that the greatest privilege that can be conferred upon people in the mass is to free them from the demoralizing influence of privilege enjoyed by the few. This is proved by the experience here, not alone of the Jews, but of all the other racial and national elements that have entered into the making of this nation. We have found that when men and women are left free to find the places for which they are best fitted, some few of them will indeed attain less exalted stations than under a regime of privilege; but the vast multitude will rise to a higher level, to wider horizons, to worthier attainments. To go forward on the same broadening lines that have marked the national development thus far must be our aim…

… Made up of so many diverse elements, our country must cling to those fundamentals that have been tried and proved as buttresses of national solidarity.

Shortly after Coolidge signed the Immigration Act, he signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to all Native Americans. Later that year, ahead of a presidential election in which the Ku Klux Klan was an active presence in the Democratic National Convention, Coolidge publicly rebuked, via written correspondence, a constituent who wanted him to prevent a Black Republican congressional candidate from being nominated:

I am amazed to receive such a letter. During the war 500,000 colored men and boys were called up under the draft, not one of whom sought to evade it. They took their places wherever assigned in defense of the nation of which they are just as truly citizens as are any others. The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color…A colored man is precisely as much entitled to submit his candidacy in a party primary as is any other citizen.

Coolidge’s defense of equal rights and Native American citizenship doesn’t directly relate to immigration, but it shows he was no white nationalist. He would not have smeared an entire African nation in racist fashion as Trump did.

The thread in Coolidge’s philosophy was a commitment to assimilation. Sometimes Coolidge is knocked for his 1923 presidential address, which sought to shape the pending immigration bill: “American institutions rest solely on good citizenship. They were created by people who had a background of self-government. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.” Since the final bill Coolidge signed used the bigoted national origin system for its quotas, it’s easy to link Coolidge’s “America must be kept American” statement to bigotry. But that doesn’t align with his later statements, that many immigrants assimilate and embrace American ideals. Coolidge’s conservative biographer Amity Shlaes even argues he “was not a great a fan of quotas as [Representative William] Dillingham” of Vermont, who first introduced the quota concept, temporarily, in a bill vetoed by Woodrow Wilson then signed by Warren Harding. Moreover, writes Shlaes, a Wall Street Journal editorial page veteran, “Coolidge no longer spoke in the racialist tones of the unfortunate articles he had written as vice president. His position now was that he did not like to judge people by their race or creed.”

Coolidge’s belief in assimilationism and celebration of diversity is starkly different from Miller’s fearmongering that the admission of one immigrant fleeing a troubled country imports “the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

Miller also doesn’t understand what the 1924 law did. It did not completely “shut down” immigration. In fact, it didn’t cap any Latino immigration from the entire Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, it did not authorize the sort of mass deportations that Miller has orchestrated at Trump’s behest in hopes of removing more than 10 million predominantly Latino undocumented immigrants and making America less diverse.

Understanding the full Coolidge record does not obligate anyone to become a fan of Silent Cal. His assimilationist policies can be criticized. For example, some Native Americans opposed the citizenship law to keep their own sovereignty. And of course, whatever discomfort Coolidge had with national origin quotas, he signed them into law, and that had a lasting impact, including the inability of America to accept Jews fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany and seeking refuge. (For a deeper exploration of Coolidge’s record on these issues, please see these panel discussions I moderated about the Indian Citizenship Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 sponsored by the Coolidge museum.)

And if Stephen Miller and his boss are genuinely interested in Coolidge’s views, they will take a look at his complete record.

The post On Immigration, Stephen Miller Is no Calvin Coolidge appeared first on Washington Monthly.

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