Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has begun baselessly claiming that birthright citizenship has become a massive welfare scam.
During an appearance on Newsmax Monday evening, Miller ranted about Donald Trump’s executive order to upend birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court will weigh next month.
“Birthright citizenship is the biggest, costliest scam in financial history,” Miller ranted. “An illegal alien could come here nine months pregnant, or on a tourist visa nine months pregnant, have a baby. That baby is then declared an automatic citizen, which then entitles the entire family to come here and live here, and every one of them get welfare … unlimited welfare, applying as the custodian of this citizen—so-called—child.”
“The biggest financial rip-off of Americans in history, not to mention the fact that it is the number one magnet for illegal immigration and invasion,” Miller continued.
With his penchant for white nationalism, Miller is no stranger to making disgusting, racist generalizations about immigrants. Miller has previously endorsed a theory called “remigration” that, unlike deportation, refers to the forcible removal of non–ethnically European immigrants and their families, regardless of their actual citizenship.
In a particularly outrageous escalation, Miller also claimed, without providing evidence, that birthright citizenship was a “major national security threat” that had been “used by foreign governments to conduct espionage against the United States.”
Halfway through his outrageous claim Monday, he switched to a hypothetical. “Because now, you see we can keep out a foreign spy who has a visa, who’s trying to get permission to board an airplane—but what happens when a foreign government uses this ridiculous birthright scam in order to create automatic citizens to then grow up as assets of a foreign government?” he demanded.
Birthright citizenship was established in the Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Congress and the states ratified the amendment in 1869 to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which had held that people of African descent can never acquire American citizenship, and to provide a constitutional backstop for Black civil rights in the South during Reconstruction. Miller argued that the use of the birthright citizenship clause had strayed too far from its intended purpose.
The ghoulish white supremacist has also become one of the Trump administration’s strongest advocates for denying due process for undocumented immigrants it seeks to remove.