The sordid history of the “public charge” rule that Trump and Miller wish to reinvent

After the Nazi takeover of Germany, there immediately began the “cleansing” of the country of those persons deemed not sufficiently “adjusted” to the new reality, the “unfit” for life, the “useless eaters”—and the untermensch who diluted and weakened the “purity” of the German “master race.” These persons were initially imprisoned in concentration camps, or in the case of mentally or physically “unfit” German adults and children who were “useless eaters,” to euthanasia centers, and for non-Germans and Jews, the death camps would await. Stephen Miller’s forbearers were certainly considered “subhuman” by the Nazis, and he would have been too if he had been living at the time; some might liken Miller’s racism as a “subhuman” quality in any case. He too could have been subject to same fate of millions who were denied safe haven outside of the grasp of the Nazi butchers, which included the U.S. with its “liable to be a public charge” immigration policy.

It was Herbert Hoover, not FDR, who initiated the “public charge” policy in 1930 as the Great Depression was under way, but FDR’s—or specifically, the State Department’s—application of the policy is certainly more infamous. In the first four years of the Nazi regime, less than a quarter of the quota permitted for German-born immigrants (presumably largely Jewish) were allowed into the country. In 1938 the U.S. did “promise” to allow 27,000 immigrants a year from Germany and Austria, but when the number of applicants ballooned to 220,000 by that September, the Evian conference in France was held to deal with the refugee crisis; but it came to nothing as most nations refused to make any commitments in the number of refugees they were willing to allow. Even refugees from countries like Romania that had tiny immigration quotas per the 1924 immigration law had impossibly long wait periods. Even a modest bill to allow German children (again, mostly Jewish) to immigrate into the country shockingly had little support from the American public, and came to nothing. 

Because of this failure by the international community to act, the Nazi leadership decided that there was nothing to gain by keeping Jews alive even as “bargaining chips,” and made the decision to find another way to get them out of the way. As the war started, Jewish immigrants were seen as potential “fifth columnists,” and applications were denied if someone had relatives still in a Nazi-occupied territory, since they would be “susceptible” to working for the Nazis as spies on the promise of “safety” for loved ones.

People keep talking about the “law” when they justify stingy immigration policy, but there is no “law” that mandates inhumanity. Only in one year during the whole period of Nazi control from 1933 to 1945 was the immigration quota actually met, due in great part by the “liable to be a public charge” policy (which was never specifically defined and arbitrarily applied)--and the fact that many Americans simply did not want them here. And it is no credit to Americans that the vast majority of the public opposed the entry of refugees from Nazi butchery. It was only when it was generally acknowledged publicly that the Nazis were exterminating millions by 1943 that there was belated support of some kind of action; but even with that knowledge, American and British negotiators at a conference in Bermuda declined to offer anything specific on what they were prepared to do in regard to refugees. The State Department continued to block both action and information about mass murder coming from Europe, and it was not until the Treasury Department’s Henry Morgenthau confronted FDR with the inaction, that the president signed an executive order to create a “War Refugee Board.” But by then it was too little and too late; even the board could do little to change the “public charge” policy, and while it boasted that it has “saved” tens of thousands from death, this was but a tiny fraction of those who were eventually exterminated.

Philosopher George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But how do we explain Stephen Miller—who is Jewish—and his anti-immigrant, right-hand thug, Kenneth Cuccinelli (the current director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services)? They have announced a new policy to strip legal immigrants already in the country of their status and make them eligible for deportation if they use any form of public assistance—including food stamps, housing subsidies or even applying for ACA benefits. Even if these people are doing the same low-wage jobs that a native-born citizens are, and the wages are not enough to put food on the table for their children, an immigrant can be denied green card status if they access any kind of assistance that a citizen can—even though they pay all applicable taxes that a citizen would—and more so, if the citizen isn’t working, and being a “public charge” full-time. Miller is resurrecting the accusation that such people  are “liable to be a public charge," but in a new, and in its own way, just as sinister. Miller, in his own sick way, seems to be suggesting that “It happened to us, so why it shouldn’t happen to you?”

Legal immigration into this country is sometimes but not always predicated on whether an immigrant has a “skill” or education level that can presumably be converted into a job; refugees and asylum seekers generally are not required to “prove” that they will not be a “public charge,” because they are deemed “special victims” of war, violence and poverty. Yet in this economy there is always work to be had for such people, and on the whole—unlike some of the “natives”—people want to work. But Trump and Miller simply do not like having these people around because they don’t like looking at them (as if Miller isn’t some nausea-inducing thing to look at), and because the administration has been unable to force through legislation in Congress to dramatically reduce of “unwanted” immigrants, they have resorted to a whole string of policy “initiatives”—family separation, “zero tolerance” for asylum seekers, allowing only a 2 or 3 people a day to apply for asylum at a given check point, warehousing children in abominable conditions, and now threatening legal immigrants by withholding  low-income assistance. The inhumanity should be apparent to all but Trump’s basest base.

The claim by the anti-immigrant far-right that immigrants are a “drain” on taxpayer dollars—principally targeting those from Latin America and Africa, and not from Europe and Asia—is a shibboleth and myth. The Trump administration’s own  Department of Labor release a news bulletin entitled “Foreign-Born Workers: Labor Force Characteristics—2018” stating that immigrants represented 17 percent of the labor force, and that they have a lower overall unemployment rate than non-immigrants, and that Mexican-born immigrants were nearly half of the total in the labor force. Foreign-born males were by a considerable margin more likely to participate in the labor force than native-born males. It found that Hispanic immigrants had a higher participation rate in the labor force than both whites and Asians, whether immigrants  or native-born. The foreign-born were more likely than native-born to be in service, natural resources, construction, maintenance, production, transportation, and material moving occupations. 

Thus those who claim that immigrants are just sitting around being a drain on public services create their own alternate reality. The truth is The International Journal of Health finding that "Overall, immigrants almost certainly paid more toward medical expenses than they withdrew, providing a low-risk pool that subsidized the public and private health insurance markets, " while another recent study estimated the total income of undocumented immigrants in 2016 to be $215 billion, while paying $16 billion in federal taxes, $9.5 billion in state and local taxes, and $16 billion in Social Security and Medicare taxes—both programs the undocumented themselves are ineligible to receive. Another study in 2015 found that if all undocumented workers were deported, the labor force would shrink by 6.4 percent, there would be a $1.6 trillion reduction in GDP, and the U.S. economy would shrink by 5.7 percent.

These statistics not just contradict Trump and Miller’s claims that legal (and illegal) immigrants are “useless eaters,” but tend to illuminate better what this is really about. Why are we still discussing whether or not these two are racists? They are, and every day it only becomes more clearly obvious.