The Authoritarian Echo: From Joseph Goebbels to Stephen Miller, and the Lessons of a Legal Workforce

Dehumanization by Design: The Quiet Efficiency of Exclusionary Law

The Cult of the Infallible Leader

In his wartime diaries, Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for Nazi Germany, wrote of Adolf Hitler: “The Führer’s genius is unique and infallible. He is the instrument of a historic mission that providence has entrusted to him.”

The language is stark, even chilling. In these words, Goebbels constructs the theological scaffolding for totalitarian rule: a leader beyond reproach, ordained by fate, exempt from human fallibility. His intent was clear, through relentless repetition of such rhetoric, Hitler would not merely govern; he would be deified.

The success of this strategy, as historians like Ian Kershaw and Richard J. Evans have noted, lay in its seduction of the public imagination. Infallibility bred obedience. Obedience bred silence. And silence made space for atrocity. There was no room for dissent in a state where dissent itself became a form of treason.

A Familiar Voice in a New Tongue

Fast forward to February 2017, when senior White House adviser Stephen Miller appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation. In defense of then-President Donald Trump’s contested travel ban, Miller proclaimed:

"The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned."

Here, too, is the seed of authoritarianism, executive power framed as absolute, immune from judicial review or public scrutiny. The rhetoric may lack Goebbels’ operatic grandiosity, but its implications echo loudly. Where Goebbels used providence, Miller invokes national security. In both, power is shrouded in necessity and insulated from challenge.

By 2025, Miller’s vision for immigration had taken fuller form. Sweeping laws were enacted to remove individuals residing in the U.S. without legal status. Their legal architecture, deliberately vague, authorized removal not only of those with criminal convictions but of anyone whose conduct might be interpreted as “undermining national interests.” Terms like “undesirable,” once used to great effect by the Third Reich, returned with renewed purpose, now cloaked in the language of legality and sovereignty.

A Fictional Dialogue, A Real Warning

Imagine, for a moment, a fictional conversation in which Hitler and Goebbels, viewing from some cold perch in history’s shadows, observe the American scene with quiet satisfaction:

"Ah yes... the Americans. Once they condemned us, waving their democracy like a banner. But now they echo our strategies, law first, always law. We never had to name the Jew when ‘undesirable’ did the trick. And their Stephen Miller, eine vorzügliche Kreatur—a bureaucrat of belonging, codifying exclusion with legal finesse. No brownshirts, no swastikas. Just expensive suits and euphemisms."

This imagined monologue serves not as equivalence, but as provocation. It asks us to examine the eerie similarities between policies born in fascism and those dressed in democratic drag. The tools may change, boots swapped for bureaucracy, but the outcomes threaten to converge when power is exercised without accountability, and law becomes an instrument of exclusion rather than justice.

Division’s Dead End

There is a deeper cost to these policies, one that reverberates beyond politics. When a society begins defining people by their perceived value to the state, when labels like “undesirable” become normalized, it risks moral collapse. The erosion of empathy begins with paperwork, with protocols, with “just following the law.” But it ends in isolation and cruelty.

Today, Americans are being asked to choose: between fearful purity and inclusive resilience. Between the convenience of exclusion and the hard work of integration. Between repeating history or learning from it.

Toward a Legal Workforce and a Stronger Republic

What makes this debate particularly urgent is that undocumented immigrants are not marginal to American life, they are central to it. They harvest crops, clean and build homes, cook meals, care for children and the elderly. Yet millions live in legal limbo, subject to exploitation and stripped of dignity.

It is time to bring these essential workers out of the shadows by committing to a 100% legal workforce, one that doesn’t criminalize necessity, but embraces it. A legalized labor force would:

• Stabilize key industries such as agriculture, hospitality, and construction.

• Protect human rights, allowing workers to report unsafe conditions and demand fair wages.

• Enhance national security through transparent, lawful hiring practices.

• Increase tax revenues and strengthen public services.

More importantly, it would allow the United States to live up to its democratic ideals, not through amnesty alone, but through a pragmatic and moral recalibration of immigration law. Seasonal visas, guest worker programs, and pathways to citizenship for long term contributors can create a system that is both lawful and humane.

Conclusion: Law With a Human Face

Goebbels believed in the supremacy of law as a weapon. Miller is turning law into a fortress. But America’s future depends on whether law can once again become a bridge, between people, between ideals, between history and hope.

If we are to preserve our democracy, we must resist the temptation to dehumanize in the name of order. We must reject the myth of national purity, which has always been a prelude to exclusion, and instead fight for a country where dignity is not a privilege, but a birthright.

It is not too late. But the hour grows short.

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Resources

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Trump vows to ‘hire American.’ His businesses keep hiring foreign guest workers

Trump Hates Legal Immigration, Except When He Loves It

Which Palm Beach institutions hold the most guest worker visas?

The Foreign Workers of Mar-a-Lago

List of U.S. states and territories by immigrant population

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