Show caption ‘Miller and Trump simply don’t think refugees look like how they imagine Americans should look.’ Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images Opinion Who will stop Stephen Miller, the man behind America's anti-refugee policy? Michael Paarlberg Miller has usurped the power of the National Security Council, state and defense departments to set refugee policy by himself Wed 25 Oct 2017 06.00 EDT Share on Facebook

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President Trump isn’t one to let a little cognitive dissonance get in the way of a nice dinner. So he didn’t miss Thursday’s gala fundraiser at the Kuwaiti embassy for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), held at a time when his administration is barring a record number of refugees from entering the US.

Since 1980, presidents have set a ceiling on how many refugees the US may admit each year. That cap ranged from over 100,000 under Bush Sr and Clinton to around 80,000 for most of Bush Jr and Obama’s administrations. Trump recently lowered the ceiling to 45,000, the lowest it’s ever been, over the objections of the Pentagon, joint chiefs of staff, state department, and Vice-President Pence, all of whom wanted it higher. Trump is also seeking to enact new rules designed to block refugees from reuniting with family members and grind the resettlement process to a halt.



Why is the US turning its back on refugees who are fleeing humanitarian disaster and a group we consider a mortal enemy? As a recent New Yorker report details, this is largely the doing of Stephen Miller, Trump’s hardline anti-immigration immigration adviser.

Stephen Miller calls CNN journalist “ignorant” - video

In a White House characterized by organizational chaos, paranoia and general incompetence, a 32-year-old ex-Hill staffer with basic knowledge of the policy process can emerge as a one-eyed king in an administration of the blind.



Thus Miller has usurped the power of the National Security Council, state and defense departments to set refugee policy by himself, beyond the bounds of his formal authority, which is domestic, not foreign policy. Out of his depth as he is, his arguments are also unbounded by things like evidence and reason.



Miller’s, and thus Trump’s, fears are threefold: refugees are an economic, security, and cultural threat to the US.

His Domestic Policy Council cherry-picks research which paints this dark picture and discards that which contradicts it, even research commissioned by the White House itself: when Trump ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to calculate the cost of refugee resettlement, the department found that the tax revenue refugees produce is $63bn more than what they cost US taxpayers. The New York Times reported that Miller then had this document squashed.



This shouldn’t have been a surprise: the results are in line with academic research that also shows refugees having a net positive impact on public budgets. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper finds that on average, refugees to the US pay $20,000 more per person in taxes than they receive in benefits. And after being established in the country, they more likely than equally educated US-born citizens to be employed, and less likely to be on welfare.



The security threat narrative is based on a misunderstanding or willful misrepresentation of the refugee screening process. “Extreme vetting” already exists: potential refugees to the US go through a 20-step process that includes three fingerprint screenings, two to three background checks, and three extensive interviews, first by the UN Refugee Agency – the same agency for which Trump attended that nice dinner – then the state department, then Department of Homeland Security.

This would explain why, of the more than 3 million refugees admitted to the US from 1975 to 2015, only three committed terrorist acts, killing three people total, all by Cubans in the 1970s before our current refugee screening process was established. None of the major mass shootings or terrorist acts in the US in recent years – San Bernardino, Boston, Orlando, Las Vegas, or 9/11 – were carried out by refugees.



This brings us to the final objection, culture, which gets us closest to the truth: Miller and Trump simply don’t think refugees look like how they imagine Americans should look. In its annual refugee report to Congress, the White House announced potential refugees will now be screened based on their “likelihood of successful assimilation”.

This is new language, Anne Richard, former assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration under Obama, tells me, and the most troubling because it’s the most arbitrary. “How do you test that?” she asks.

Trump has raised the issue of treatment of women in his executive orders banning travel from Muslim countries, which is ironic coming from Trump. “They’re not worried about how women are treated,” says Richard. “It’s all hogwash. In reality, they just don’t want Muslims to come here.”



Strip away the policy excuses about budgets and public safety and you’re left with the cultural ones. This is what Miller is getting at when he lashes out at journalists for “cosmopolitan bias”, an epithet once reserved for Jews. This is an administration which considers religion a valid test for un-American-ness.