We're better than concentration camps

Are detention facilities along the U.S.’s southern border refugee camps or concentration camps?

That seems to be the question in the minds of people, most recently Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The freshman Democrat from New York referred to these camps housing immigrants from Mexico and Central America as the latter over the weekend, prompting a reply from Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King.

King pointed to a trip he took last year to Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp, and urged Ocasio-Cortez to accept an open invitation to her from a Holocaust remembrance group to visit the camp and see what a real concentration camp looks like. King said it was a “profound personal experience” for him.

King’s meeting afterwards with a group founded by a former Nazi SS officer and the resulting tit-for-tat between him and Ocasio-Cortez aside, the question remains. Is the United States guilty of housing immigrants fleeing violence and economic distress in Central America in concentration camps or refugee camps?

In a June 18, 2019 piece in GQ Magazine, Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps” points out that prior to World War II, the term “concentration camp” described the phase of detaining civilians without trial based on group identity. The Spanish Empire did this to rural Cuban women and children during a rebellion in 1896, the U.S. followed suit several years later in the Philippines and the British warehoused South Africans early in the 20th century.

It also happened in southern France during the 1936 Spanish Civil War and most recently in 2012 in Myanmar when over 100,000 Rohingya Muslims were segregated into camps based on their religion.

In the current case in the U.S., this description fits what’s happening along the border with Mexico. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, following edicts and enthusiasm from the Trump Administration, seized people crossing the border and herd them into camps to remain under often terrible conditions, going so far as to separate parents from children.

The latter practice was started in 2017 under then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and only ceased (sort of) in 2018 through presidential executive order after bipartisan complaints on the humanity of the practice reached a loud crescendo that couldn’t be ignored. That didn’t stop Trump, of course, from claiming that he wasn’t the one who initiated the practice (he blamed Barack Obama, as usual) but that he was the one who stopped it.

I don’t know how I should classify this one – typical self-aggrandizing Trump hyperbole, White House fake news or an outright, bald-faced lie.

Be that as it may, resentment towards immigrants from south of the border isn’t something that can be laid solely at Trump’s doorstep. Pitzer notes that President Bill Clinton stated in 1993 that we would not surrender our southern border to “those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice,” and with the help of Republican Congress, began expanding detention for migrants.

That process has continued with each president since then. But Trump based his run for the presidency on fear and loathing of Mexicans and Central Americans, much as Adolph Hitler did in the 1930s on Jews.

Trump has continued to demonize our neighbors to the south who seek the promise of this country – at least hypothetical promise, it would seem – of a new life away from violence and economic and societal depression. That philosophy has liberated similar feelings among millions of Americans and found its way into policy, hence migrants put in squalid conditions where their health and safety are impacted. Some have died, mostly children.

If they were refugee camps, this wouldn’t happen. They would be welcomed, housed and cared for as if they were our cousins.

Sorry folks, the detention facilities along our southern border are concentration camps, similar to but perhaps not the same as the camps we created in the 1940s for Japanese-Americans. In a way, they’re worse.

We’d like to think we are a society that is better than this. Trouble is history teaches us otherwise.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].