The march ended with a whimper, not a bang, which is a victory of sorts.
By all accounts, just a couple of dozen white supremacists and Nazis – some draped in quasi-military garb and holding flags, some with their faces concealed to better keep their day jobs – marched in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, a flaccid end to the Unite the Right redux.
The optics were odd.
Leader Jason Kessler and his band of followers intent on enjoying their First Amendment rights were first herded onto the D.C. Metro, then through the Foggy Bottom section of D.C., at all times corralled by an outsized police presence and outflanked by hundreds of counter-protesters, shouting “shame, shame, shame!” in unison.
(Still no safe spaces on the gridiron, though.)
The low turnout seemed like a pragmatic move for the hate crowd. Many of Kessler’s supporters have been shamed back into the shadows of public life since the first rally. More recently, he accidentally revealed the identity of others in his bid to get a permit to march in Virginia, further imperiling their reputations. Organizing is harder now that they’re unwelcome on almost every payment platform. But their presence was largely unnecessary: Their ideas are now enshrined in powerful circles.
This is partly the point of this moving essay from Dr. David S. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist. He is three generations removed from an extraordinary immigration story, one that speaks directly to the perils of escaping a hopeless present for the possibility of a better future:
It begins at the turn of the 20th century in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.
He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish he understood no English.
It begins at the turn of the 20th century in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.
He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish he understood no English.
As you may have guessed, the Glossers largely thrived. In this case, from “street corner peddling and sweat-shop toil,” to “selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy.”
Fast forward to today, and they’ve made it all the way to the West Wing. In a wild plot twist, White House chief strategist Stephen Miller is Glosser’s nephew. Miller has been working effectively behind the scenes to gut protections for immigrants and refugees, first as a co-creator of President Trump’s executive order banning travel to the U.S. from certain Muslim-majority countries, then in support of the family separation policy at the U.S. Southern border, and now, in a renewed push to place draconian limits on legal immigration and dramatically cap the number of refugees admitted per year.
Glosser does not pull any punches when it comes to Stephen Miller. “I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” he says.
Yet the true strength of his essay is not his public shaming of his nephew’s attempt to pull up the very ladder that made their family possible. Instead, it’s the welcome reminder of how so many immigrants have paid their hard work and good fortune forward in informed and generous ways.
Glosser is a longtime volunteer with HIAS (once called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), a global non-profit agency that works to protect refugees. In his capacity as a neuropsychologist, he has treated people like the man he calls “Joseph,” who was conscripted to be a child soldier in Eritrea, then later tortured near to death because he’d been discovered with a bible. His escape from a civilian clinic led him to a Sudanese refugee camp; his subsequent journey to America took ten horrific years, which Glosser documents with candor and tenderness.
Joseph and his family are also thriving now. In part, it speaks to the conversation around immigration that we are not having: That despite the deeply flawed “system” currently in place, immigrants as a whole continue to contribute to the economic well-being of the country, often at the highest levels. In total, they give more than they take. And, almost half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or a first generation American.
The world is a mess and getting messier. We should talk about all of it. But if we allow the powerful to demonize entire groups of people only to fall silent when hate speech gains traction online and in real life, then perhaps the shame should be spread around.
“Most damning is the administration’s evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country of origin, and religion,” writes Glosser. “No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us.”