Comment by MildlySerious
5 months ago
Trump's entire campaign ran on curbing immigration, closing the borders and deportation of illegal immigrants. The one exception to that (the H-1B story) caused a lot of upheaval in his base. Among the many crazy things he said were things like people having to go out and vote for the last time, that he will be a dictator for a day, and calling his political opponents vermin. I'll just mention Project 2025 and his former wife mentioning that he's had a book of Hitler speeches by his bedside in passing.
Among the first acts on his first day as president he shuts down an app that helped people immigrate legally.
The first swath of Biden era executive orders rescinded[1] includes migration related ones to now loosen and reduce oversight and enable more heavy handed treatment of the matter, creating the foundation to conduct the type of raids that started happening the second he was certified[2].
Then at his inauguration this unfortunate little mishap occurs. Twice, mind you. By a man who continually promotes and enables alt-right ideology.
If you squint really, really hard, it's a dog whistle. That's the best case scenario. For everyone else, Elon Musk unambiguously performed a Nazi salute.
The absence of this moment from alt-right safe spaces like r/conservative and the X/Twitter feeds of prominent influencers despite the fact that their user base seems to have loved it is, in itself, a story worth telling.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/init...
[2] https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/01/kern-county-immigrati...
You might not agree with these policies, but they are defensible, sensible policies and not that much different from polices and statements under Obama.
fun fact:
> deportation of illegal immigrants
Initially Hitler Germany also, at least to the outside, pushed a position of them just wanting to "deport" Jews outside of Germany. They then decided to instead place them into forced labor camps to extract value out of them while slowly working them to death and later (but not much later) they also started with the industrialized mass killing in death camps.
Similar before murdering Jews they started with going after disabled people and then queer people as this was part of their idea of healing (i.e purging) Germany.
Not saying the US will treat immigrants like Nazi Germany did treat Jews, that would be dump.
But given how they have a profit orientated prison system which more or less forced people to extremely underplayed work and how being an illegal immigrant is a crime and given how some US companies are looking for replacing "cheap labor" from China with something else more under their control I would still be worried.
Nobody wanted to take them. That's why they put them in camps initially.
Sweden for example asked germany to provide jews with a jewish-non-german passport so that they could be identified as jews and denied entry.
yes, no one wanted to take a huge blob of people which where forced to leaf while leaving their wealth behind, forced to sell any properties or similar they had for dumping prices etc.
_which is something EVERYONE involved knew before Nazi Germany "tried" to deport them_
but do you really think things will be much different just because the "large blob of not-wealthy people" are not Jews?
I mean sure it will be a bit different, like there likely will be less systematic disowning of wealth (but then it's hard to imagine Trump not trying to fine and deport them and US police not confiscating money they have (like abuse of civil seizure is AFIK a huge problem in some US states). And for those who have a Mexican passport or similar Trump might be able to force Mexico to take them back.
But we are speaking about so many people that there will be thousands or more likely tens of thousand where you can't just place them back where they came from, weather it's because you don't know where they came from or that place simply not taking them back as long as you can't proof they are from there which you often can't.
Then what you do with them? You already arrested them, treated them as pretty bad criminals, right? So you place them in prison. Except prisons are full, so you create new camps, eh prisons, for them and then for money saving you make just a few of them where you concentrate all the refuges in... congratulation you just reinvented the core concept of concentration camps. Now here is a thing, the use has a problem with forced labor and all this people need to be feed and they can't work freely, so what do you do, you force them to work to reduce the cost of such camps. Now we are at the early state of Nazi Concentration camps (not to be confused with Nazi death camps).
But you still have the problem of a huge blob of people you can't let go or bring anywhere and pretending it's "just" forced prison labor will only work for so long. A nasty problem to solve where most solutions are either expensive or evil and inhuman (even more so then what I described before). Or in other (Nazi) terms you need a final solution.
Anyway my point isn't that Trump will build death camps, even if we do for a moment assume he is evil enough to do so he has no reason to do so. And Nazi Germany didn't create industrialized death camps because they wanted to do the most evil shit they can imagine, but because that seems for them the most practical way to get ride of all Jews. Same for the non-death camp concentration camps, they where created for practical reason, too. (Which doesn't make it less evil.)
So the point here are two:
- the "only deport them" thing of Nazis was all just make pretend, excuses for the public allowing Nazis to then do much worse things "because there is no other choice". Other countries not wanting to take them was well known beforehand and part of the plan.
- doing huge mass deportations in any even just somewhat human way is basically never practically possible, and it's a steep slippery slop where you easily can end up with concentration camps, even if such camps aren't created with the intend of genocide they are still a huge issue
Now the lucky part is: Trump probably can somewhat reach his goals with just deporting a small fraction of the people he claims he will deport. And doing so would be much cheaper for the US. The unlucky part is "immigrant prison camps with forced labor" is more profitable for a few people running this "prisons" and Trump seem to not care about the health of the US as a whole (at lest there is no other way I can interpret him nuking the bipartisan passed bill to at lest slightly fix US infrastructure and drink water quality issues, well except if you nuke it because you expect to have thousands of cheap forced labor soon...).
To extend on the parallels: Project 2025 sets the foundation for persecuting queer people. The Project 2025 mandate both suggests categorizing gender affirming care for children as child abuse (p 5) and suggests the death penalty for, among other things, child abuse (p 554).
In conspiracy and qanon circles leaders of the left and basically anyone voicing dissenting views have been labelled as pedophiles for years (while Trump's presence on Epstein's flight logs, pictures of Trump/Musk with Epstein and Maxwell continue to be ignored and explained away) and this I fear creates enough ambiguity to not only cause a lot of harm to those affected, but to abuse these policies and go after political enemies for supporting/enabling these now outlawed things.
As someone from Germany, the whole Project 2025 document reads like a nightmare come true again, but this bit in particular mirrors the past in the most dreadful ways.
The Project 2025 that he disavowed? Do you want trying arguing with facts rather than some evil figment of your imagination?
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