JD Vance, Immigration Hawks Applaud Stephen Miller's Promotion to WH Chief of Staff

Vice President JD Vance and immigration reformers applauded the appointment of populist immigration hawk Stephen Miller to the White House chief of staff, following the post-election wipeout of Susie Wiles. “Stephen Miller is an amazing patriot and will do great things,” Vance said. “Congrats to him on a well-deserved promotion!” The appointment is good news for Vance, whose likely 2028 campaign for the White House will need top-level support from President Donald Trump and his various allies. Miller’s appointment also will help offset Democrat pressure on Trump for crippling policy giveaways. That pressure is likely to include legal threats of post-retirement investigations and criminal charges. Miller is the most ideologically pro-American advocate against the mass migration that is sidelining millions of Americans for the benefit of progressives and investors. He played a critical role in the 2013 defeat of the “Gang of Eight’s” cheap-labor amnesty bill, and helped persuade Trump to adopt a low-migration economic strategy. “It’s great news for today, and even better news for 2028,” responded Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. Miller “will ensure that the popular policies that the President campaigned on in 2024 — the policies that won him the White House, are actually implemented.” Miller will be busy in the new job, but will have room to run migration-related policy engagement with the Democrats, predicted Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Krikorian told Breitbart News: Enforcement is imperative both in a policy sense and a political sense. Broadly speaking, the public wants immigration control, but they don’t like to see pictures of it … [T]his is a good opportunity for a reset in two ways. One, recalibrate the balance between [public] body-armor [enforcement] and [private] briefcase enforcement. Do a lot more payroll audits, no-match letters, debanking of illegal aliens, and change the “Know Your Customer” rule for banks. All of this stuff can have an enormous impact [on migrants’ incentives]. It’s way more likely to get people to leave than memes of people in shackles going on a plane. Also, you can’t take a picture of it! It’s not police chasing anybody else [on the street]. It’s all very anodyne, but also very effective. I’ve made that case before … Even the vice president in his diagnosis on Twitter said he’s open to focusing enforcement more on employers. He continued with his suggestions. “The other thing that may benefit them is talk to the Democrats. They can say, ‘Look, how about instead of some kind of comprehensive blah blah bullshit [deal] that never works and is bad anyway for the country, how about something more like what I, President Trump, proposed back in 2018, which is some kind of targeted amnesty for a targeted group of people in exchange for some discreet and targeted policy changes?'” As an example, he talked about the possibility of “amnesty [for] the TPS people in exchange for getting rid of TPS in the future and also prohibiting presidents, starting with Trump — but any president — from just giving work permits to any illegal alien he wants to. That’s a deal I would leap at, and would do the country a lot of good, and would not create this moral hazard of incentivizing future illegal immigration … because you just got rid of the vehicles [TPS and work permit rules] that people use to de facto amnesty themselves here.” However, he said, “The Democrats will never go for anything at all because they think they’re the Vanguard Party of history and think they’re going to win in ’28 … [and then] implement the DSA’s [pro-]immigration policy. “But it doesn’t matter because the optics would be healthy. I don’t think it would be too demoralizing for Republican voters because it’s an amnesty — you shouldn’t deny it, you shouldn’t play word games — but it’s a targeted partial amnesty for one population that gets us really significant [good] changes in statute that can’t just be wished away by President AOC,” Krikorian continued. “The [political] benefit is that it shows the Republicans heard the [2026] voters,” he said. “They’re offering some modest, step-by-step solutions that don’t try to do everything, but try to be responsive both to people’s concerns and some of the policy problems. If Democrats are not even willing to talk about it, well, that’s on them.” In contrast, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer, who owns an auto sales business in Virginia, lamented Miller’s elevation: