Story highlights Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Stephen Miller's use of the word "cosmopolitan" during a discussion of immigration should alarm all Americans.

The word has terrible echoes from history, and was used by authoritarians to tag those who oppose them for harassment and worse, she writes

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a frequent contributor to CNN Opinion, and professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. Follow her on Twitter @ruthbenghiat. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) When I was a child, we had a next-door neighbor, an elderly woman. She spoke only to my mother, who was blonde, green-eyed and Scottish. When my dark-skinned father (who was from the Middle East, but often taken for Indian or Hispanic) would cross her path, she would stare stonily into the distance. It was awkward.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

My father was the American citizen, with a security clearance for the contract work he did for the United States Navy, but my mother, a green card holder, was the one who apparently made this lady comfortable. One day my ball went over the fence and I had to knock on her door. I decided to ask her why she only said hello to my mother. Referring to my father, she replied, "I am never sure how good his English is. He seems ... rather cosmopolitan."

This episode, and her use -- for whatever reason -- of that curious word, stayed with me, and came back to me Wednesday when President Trump's senior adviser, Stephen Miller, accused CNN's Senior White House Correspondent Jim Acosta of showing "cosmopolitan bias" in challenging an administration-backed immigration plan. The proposed legislation would sharply limit legal immigration and privilege "skilled" workers for, among other things, speaking English. "It sounds like you're trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country," Acosta said

In fact, that's exactly what a long tradition of racist regimes have tried to do, while branding those who oppose them as "cosmopolitan." The word has served as a convenient way to tag people suspected of having extra-national allegiances or elitist cultural tastes, or of being insufficiently "assimilated" because of how they look, speak or live.

For both fascist and communist regimes in the 20th century, Jews were the biggest "cosmopolitan" offenders. They were easy to accuse of being somehow foreign. The Jewish community of Rome had been around for thousands of years, and yet was included in Mussolini's 1938 racial laws that targeted Italian Jews, who were widely implicated in the state press as the agents of a "cosmopolitanism" led by a people "without countries, ideals, or traditions."

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