The Return of American Eugenics

On November 27th, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board published an article entitled The Ambush on the National Guard: The alleged shooting by an Afghan 'partner' shouldn't condemn all who assisted the U.S. and now live here. The closing paragraph reads as follows:

“tens of thousands [of Afghan refugees] are building new lives here in peace and are contributing to their communities. They shouldn't be blamed for the violent act of one man. Collective punishment of all Afghans in the U.S. won't make America safer and it might embitter more against the United States.”

Why do the editorial board writers feel the need to publicly defend Afghani refugees, and from whom?

The day before, on November 26th, two National Guard members were shot near the White House; 20 year old Sarah Beckstrom tragically died from her injuries, while 24 year old Andrew Wolfe remains in critical condition. The alleged shooter is an Afghan refugee by the name of Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who "was part of a secret unit of Afghans who operated under CIA direction and hunted down Taliban commanders in highly dangerous missions [during the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan]." Lakanwal was one of nearly 200,000 Afghans admitted into the United States under President Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome, which allowed them to stay in the country on parole for two years and claim asylum. The operation prioritized Afghani citizens who faced credible threats from the resurgent Taliban regime.

After Lakanwal’s identity was revealed, Republican leaders immediately seized on this opportunity to spread racist propaganda.

Here’s Stephen Miller – White House deputy chief of staff for policy, homeland security advisor, and “Trump’s Brain” – directly responding to the Wall Street Journal's plea:

“At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands."

The dire conditions of a developing country like Afghanistan, currently suffering under Taliban rule, cannot be separated from geopolitical history. Afghanistan has only been a sovereign country for 100 years. In the last 40 years alone, it’s been invaded twice by global superpowers: by the USSR in 1979, and by the United States in 2001. That’s to say nothing of the previous two thousand years of human history in the Middle East. 

Stephen Miller, drawing upon his own bigoted beliefs, ignores this history entirely. He blames Afghanistan’s current problems on “Afghani society”, a supposedly hostile cultural monolith that’s incapable of assimilation. What’s most disturbing, however, is Miller’s insistence that even their descendants are incapable of assimilation, implying there’s some sort of genetic factor at play. This kind of rhetoric robs immigrants of human agency and dignity.

Trump followed suit, vowing to reexamine every Afghani refugee and halt all immigration from “third world countries”. Unlike Miller, however, his rhetoric isn't couched in pseudo-intellectualism; it's blatant and unhinged. Below is footage of two separate occasions where Trump went on a racist tirade, both within the last week:

12/2: 12/2: “When I watch what is happening in Minnesot… and I see these people… Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars. Billions. Every year, billions of dollars. And they contribute nothing. The welfare’s like 88%. They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you. Somebody said ‘oh that’s not politically correct’, I don’t care. I don’t want them in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country. I could say that about other countries too. I can say that about other countries too. We don’t want them to, we gotta, we have to rebuild our country. Our country is at a tipping point… we’re gonna 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, c’mon, let’s make this place great. These are people that do nothing but complain. They complain. And from where they came from, they got nothing. You know, they came from paradise and they said this isn’t paradise. But when they come from hell, and they complain, and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it." (JD Vance bangs on the table in support, laughing it up with Pete Hegseth and Howard Lutnick)

12/9: “I’ve also announced a permanent pause on third world migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries. (audience member yells shithole) I didn’t say shithole, you did. Remember I said that to the senators… We had a meeting, and I say why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few. From Denmark, do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But, we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime; the only thing they’re good at is going after ships.”

The arguments made by Miller (and especially Trump) are remarkably similar to the drivel spewed by early American eugenicists, specifically those that supported the Immigration Act of 1924. This act “dramatically reduced immigration from eastern and southern Europe and practically barred it from Asia.” An excellent academic article written by Professor Kenneth Ludmerer in 1972 elucidates the movement behind the act. He pointed out that influential eugenicists successfully lobbied Congress by “[furnishing] the biological ‘justification’ of the ‘inferiority’ of southern and eastern Europeans.” Of course, it didn’t hurt that the President and his Secretary of Labor shared those sentiments as well:

“Writing in Good Housekeeping, [President Calvin Coolidge] had stated: ‘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 other 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.’ [Coolidge’s Secretary of Labor, James J. Davis,] believed that ‘America has always prided itself upon having for its basic stock the so-called Nordic races… we should bar from our shores all races which are not naturalizable under the law of the land and all individuals of all races who are physically, mentally, morally and spiritually undesirable, and who constitute a menace to our civilization.’”

The only difference between the American eugenics movement of the 1920s and the American eugenics movement today are the targets. The end-goal remains the same: to keep out as many non-white immigrants as possible and prioritize white immigration wherever we can. Just a decade ago, expressing these sentiments in public would’ve yielded social and political consequences. Not anymore. This shift of the Overton Window isn’t lost on Dr. David Glosser – Stephen Miller’s uncle – who strongly repudiated the return of eugenic immigration policy back in 2018. In his article, he points out that Miller is a direct descendant of an eastern European immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in 1903. Just two decades later, President Calvin Coolidge would sign the Immigration Act of 1924 (one of Miller’s biggest inspirations).

Professor Ludmerer concluded his 1972 article with a harrowing quote: Only after Hitler achieved power, when the full implications of ‘eugenic schemes’ became generally recognized, did many supporters of a biological immigration law become vocal opponents of hereditary deterministic explanations of human nature.” Luckily, we are not literally living in 1930s Germany. Trump is not literally Hitler. But the political and societal guardrails that have kept eugenicists out of power have completely eroded. Millions of Americans have either welcomed or forgotten that when we reward bigots with political power, they use it.

The Democratic Party today is full of nostalgia for a bipartisan past, one where Democrats and Republicans simply disagreed on how to uphold a shared set of ideals. That cannot be the Democratic Party of the future. Until the Republican Party excises and condemns its rotten MAGA doctrine, Democratic politicians should treat their colleagues across the aisle the same way they treat immigrants – with disdain and contempt.