A possible source for “asylums”

The common wisdom about the current occupant’s frequent references to countries emptying their prisons and asylums into the United States is that he doesn’t understand the difference between an asylum and a request for asylum. Maybe. But a passing reference in a The New York Times article (gift link) makes me wonder if that’s the case:

By the turn of the 20th century, anti-immigrant sentiment was rampant. The lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant wrote in his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, that foreign countries were taking advantage of America’s openness by unloading “the sweepings of their jails and asylums” and that the “whole tone of American life, social, moral and political has been lowered and vulgarized by them.”

I doubt the current occupant has the patience to make it to page 89 of that book. But I can guess who in the White House does, and who might be feeding talk of prisons and asylums to the current occupant: Stephen Miller.

(And who in 2025 speaks of “asylums” anyway?)

Irony of ironies: Madison Grant was writing about immigrants, in his words,

drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos.

He was writing about people like Stephen Miller’s great-grandparents, Ashkenazi Jews who fled to the United States from Belarus in 1903. And Grant was writing about people like Dean Martin’s and Frank Sinatra’s ancestors. Miller recently praised a Martin/Sinatra Christmas special in these terms: “Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.” The very people Miller celebrates are people whom Madison Grant would have preferred to keep out of the country.

The New Republic has a recent long piece about Stephen Miller’s worldview and aspirations: “Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State.” It includes a link to an unpublished family history written by Miller’s maternal grandmother, Ruth Glosser.

And here’s some commentary from Miller’s uncle, David S. Glosser.

[I don’t have the stomach to make it through more than a page of Madison Grant’s book. I searched its contents in Google Books and found the relevant passages on page 89.]