How closely is Daniel Miller tracking the news ahead of the referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union? "Hourly!" he grins. The Sun's recent editorial calling for the UK's departure got him quite excited.

Miller, though, is not from London or Liverpool. He hails from Longview, Texas, and we are talking in a cafe in the bleakly industrial Gulf coast town of Port Arthur, some 5,000 miles from Westminster.

Culturally, too, we are a long way from Europe. Heck, we are even a long way from Dallas. But the referendum matters deeply to Miller and like-minded Texans. As the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, which wants Texas to secede from the United States, he is hoping for a Leave vote that he believes will ripple all the way from Austria to Austin.

"There are a lot of people asking if Brexit why not Texit?" he says. "I do talk with some folks over there on a pretty regular basis that are involved in Ukip and the Conservative party."

The night before we met, Miller addressed a local Tea Party group, drawing parallels between Brexit and Texit, which the TNM is pushing as a hashtag. In Miller's telling, Britain's relationship with Europe was a marriage of convenience between ill-suited partners that has become stormy and ripe for divorce on grounds of irreconcilable differences, with too much sovereignty ceded to an ineffective central bureaucracy and too much hard-earned money sent elsewhere.

"Sound familiar?" he asked the audience. "Nigel Farage, you guys ever heard of him? Look him up on YouTube – trust me, you will enjoy."

Added to the near-miss of Scottish independence in 2014, a vote for Brexit on 23 June, Miller tells me, "only helps our case because there is a concrete first world example of a modern democracy having a legitimate and public debate where the people of a country, not the political class, get to vote on how they govern themselves and that will resonate not just through Europe but here as well".