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Stephen Miller's Impossible America by Paul Starr
ast New Year’s Eve, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted an image online of an inviting, deserted beach with a classic mid-20th-century car parked on the sand. In the sky were the words “America After 100 Million Deportations,” and above the image was a caption, “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.”
This fantasy scenario, the removal of more than a quarter of the U.S. population, didn’t come from a random online troll. It was posted on X by the official feed of the federal agency charged with immigration enforcement.
The driving force behind the Trump administration’s efforts to stop the “third world” from “besieging” the United States is Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. Just four days before the post by DHS, Miller himself had tweeted another fantasy: “Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon—but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for sixty years.”
More from Paul Starr
There’s that euphemism “third world” again, so much more discreet than the explicitly racial terms Miller’s forerunners used when they shut down immigration a century ago. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that Miller describes as opening our borders to the third world abolished the national origin quotas from 1924 that had limited immigration mainly to Northern and Western Europeans. Since the 1965 reforms, 76 million immigrants have come to the United States, almost 90 percent of them from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Miller has a clear message to the tens of millions of his fellow Americans with those origins: “The United States would be a far better country without you.”
This fantasy scenario, the removal of more than a quarter of the U.S. population, didn’t come from a random online troll. It was posted on X by the official feed of the federal agency charged with immigration enforcement.
The driving force behind the Trump administration’s efforts to stop the “third world” from “besieging” the United States is Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. Just four days before the post by DHS, Miller himself had tweeted another fantasy: “Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon—but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for sixty years.”
More from Paul Starr
There’s that euphemism “third world” again, so much more discreet than the explicitly racial terms Miller’s forerunners used when they shut down immigration a century ago. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that Miller describes as opening our borders to the third world abolished the national origin quotas from 1924 that had limited immigration mainly to Northern and Western Europeans. Since the 1965 reforms, 76 million immigrants have come to the United States, almost 90 percent of them from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Miller has a clear message to the tens of millions of his fellow Americans with those origins: “The United States would be a far better country without you.”
https://prospect.org/2026/05/26/stephen-millers-impossible-america/]