The Experiment That Changed Everything: Stephen Miller Demands an Honest Conversation About the 1965 Immigration Act

In a candid and explosive interview that has sent tremors through the national political discourse, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller sat down with Fox News to deliver a bombshell critique of America’s immigration system. Miller, known as a driving force behind President Donald Trump’s hardline policies, didn’t mince words, asserting that the entire framework of the conversation around immigration is fundamentally dishonest and corrupted. His claim is simple yet terrifying: the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, he argues, unleashed the “single largest experiment on a society on a civilization that had ever been conducted in human history,” and the results—from failing assimilation to surging social strain—are now undeniable.

Miller’s thesis is not merely about border control; it’s a deep, foundational challenge to the post-1965 American identity, arguing that the social engineering resulting from that Act is the root cause of many crises that plague the nation today, from public safety to education. The conversation he calls for is one the political establishment and legacy media, he suggests, are terrified to have.

The “Greatest Scam” and the Act of Spite

To fully appreciate the scope of Miller’s argument, one must first understand his stark view of illegal immigration. He dismisses the narrative often heard in advocacy circles and delivers a brutal assessment: immigrants who cross the border illegally are engaged in nothing less than an “act of spite against America.”

“They continue to break our laws and flout our system and defy our rules every single day they’re here and continue to plunder and pillage off the system,” Miller stated, framing the very presence of undocumented individuals as a continuous act of defiance against the nation’s sovereignty.

But his most emotionally charged language was reserved for the concept of birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens. Miller branded the policy as “the greatest scam in history,” a mechanism by which these children are granted “unlimited welfare for life,” with the benefits ultimately flowing to the legal alien parents. This rhetoric establishes a clear emotional hook: the system, in his view, is being exploited and looted by those who show contempt for the laws they have violated. It is a powerful narrative designed to strip away nuance and present the issue as a zero-sum conflict between law-abiding citizens and a population engaged in systemic “plunder.”

The Catastrophe of 1965: A Global Experiment Unleased

Miller’s historical focus, however, centers on the 1965 Immigration Act, an overhaul of previous quota-based systems. He traces the roots of the Act back to the Civil Rights era, describing it as an attempt to apply the principles of civil rights not just to domestic policy, but to global immigration. The resulting change was a system that transitioned from a “tightly restricted” framework to one that suddenly established the “global ability of people in every part of the world to come to America in ever growing numbers.”

The consequences, in Miller’s analysis, were unprecedented. This change facilitated a mass migration that allowed people to “bring their families to America and then eventually empty out their entire towns and their entire villages to the United States of America.” The scope of this transformation is what earns the label of an “experiment.” Between 1965 and today, Miller asserts, the US has absorbed 76 million immigrants, largely, he emphasizes, from the “third world.” This figure, compounded by their descendants, represents a demographic and societal shift of such magnitude that Miller suggests no civilization has ever willingly subjected itself to. It is the deliberate, profound, and ongoing transformation of the nation’s social contract.

Importing Failure: When Societies Fail to Assimilate

The heart of Miller’s argument—and the point that sparks the most visceral reaction—is his claim that the policy, by encouraging immigration from countries that struggle with governance and societal stability, simply imports and replicates their problems. He uses Somalia as a pointed example, noting that not only is the first generation often unsuccessful, but one sees “persistent issues in every subsequent generation.”

He cites consistent high rates of welfare use, persistent criminal activity, and, critically, “consistent failures to assimilate.”

Miller’s logic here is brutal and uncompromising: “If Somalians cannot make Somalia successful, why would we think that the track record would be any different in the United States?” He applies this to any country around the world that “continue[s] to fail,” asking a deeply provocative question: “If you bring those societies into our country and then give them unlimited free welfare, what do we think is going to happen?” The outcome, in his view, is the replication of the very conditions they left behind—poverty, instability, and social stratification.

Host Will Cain echoed this sentiment, making a crucial distinction: the problem is not the individual immigrant, but the sheer numbers that arrive. When the influx is so massive, he notes, there is “never a requirement and often even not a desire to assimilate,” which leads to the “importation of the previous society.” This creates unassimilated communities where a cohesive, common bond with the existing nation is never formed.

Miller then ties this lack of assimilation to political subversion, warning that foreign immigrants can become advocates not for the United States, but for the countries they left. He points to the politics of the Somali community in Minnesota, claiming there is a “constant concern about how to reorient US politics around Somalia,” often using welfare fraud and pillaging of the US financial system to “prop up a foreign country.” The US, in this scenario, ceases to be an object of patriotic devotion and becomes merely a vehicle for foreign financial and political interests.

The Masked Crisis: The Hidden Cost of Immigration

One of the most compelling parts of Miller’s monologue is his assertion that the true impact of mass immigration is systematically “masked” in public policy debates. He argues that a host of national crises are debated as organic, sudden phenomena—schools “suddenly fail,” violent crime “suddenly explodes,” the deficit “suddenly skyrockets”—when in reality, they are a direct result of the “social policy choices that we made through immigration.”

He offers specific, startling examples to illustrate this point:

• Education: “If you subtract immigration out of test scores all of a sudden our test scores skyrocket,” he claims, suggesting that the influx of non-native populations pulls down national averages and hides the true performance of American students.

• Healthcare: Similarly, he asserts that removing the costs associated with immigrant populations would mean the US would “not have nearly the size of the healthcare challenges our country faces.”

• Public Safety: Finally, he contends that subtracting immigration out of public safety would eliminate violent crime in “so many of our cities.”

These claims suggest a level of intentional deception or at least willful ignorance at the highest levels of government and media, where the core driver of social strain is omitted from the diagnosis. For Miller, these crises are not just happening to us; they are the predictable, measurable fallout of a reckless societal experiment.

The Radical Solution: A Moratorium and the 1924 Precedent

Given the severity of his diagnosis, Miller’s prescription is equally radical. He advocates for the adoption of the policy that President Trump called for: a “moratorum on immigration from third world countries.” This pause, he argues, is not a punishment but a necessity—a chance for the US to “heal ourselves as a nation” and solve deep-seated issues in education, healthcare, public safety, assimilation, and culture.

To support this drastic measure, he points to a forgotten period of American history established by the 1924 Immigration Act. This legislation imposed strict quotas, fundamentally reversing the mass European immigration that occurred between 1880 and 1920, which Miller notes had also posed “enormous stresses on the US system both economically and in terms of security.”

What followed, he reminds us, is a rarely discussed fact: from 1920 to 1970, there was a “half century of negative migration.” During this period, the foreign-born population declined by 40%. Simultaneously, the US population doubled naturally. Miller argues that this half-century of restricted migration was the “cauldron in which a unified shared national identity was formed.”

He concludes by linking this era of restricted immigration directly to a period of American greatness: they went through a depression together, they went through world wars together, and they landed on the moon together. This golden age of unity, innovation, and shared national purpose, he asserts, was made possible by the absence of the constant, overwhelming societal strain caused by mass migration.