Truth-Out: Nazis Once Published List of Jewish Crimes, Trump Now Pushing to Do the Same for Immigrant Crimes

By Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh:

The Trump administration has announced plans to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants living in so-called sanctuary cities, where local officials and law enforcement are refusing to comply with federal immigration authorities' efforts to speed up deportations. The plans for the weekly list, to be published by the Department of Homeland Security, were included in Trump's executive orders signed last week. We speak to Andrea Pitzer. Her upcoming book is called One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

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AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what President Trump has said he's going to do: keep a list of, quote, "immigrant crimes"?

ANDREA PITZER: Well, this weekly report that he has called for recalls a number of things from the past that we have seen before, which is this move to isolate and identify and then vilify a vulnerable minority community in order to move against it. When he -- I just went back last night and reread his speech from when he declared his candidacy, and the Mexican rapist comment was in from the beginning, and so this has been a theme throughout. And we see back in Nazi Germany there was a paper called -- a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer, and they had a department called "Letter Box," and readers were invited to send in stories of supposed Jewish crimes. And Der Stürmer would publish them, and they would include some pretty horrific graphic illustrations of these crimes, as well. And there was even a sort of a lite version of it, if you will, racism lite, in which the Neues Volk, which was more like a Look or a Life magazine, which normally highlighted beautiful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, would run a feature like "The Criminal Jew," and they would show photos of "Jewish-looking," as they called it, people who represented different kinds of crimes that one ought to watch out for from Jews.

So this preoccupation with focusing in on one subset of the population's crimes and then depicting that as somehow depraved and abnormal from the main population is something we've seen quite a bit in the past, even in the US Before Japanese-American internment, you had newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle running about the unassimilability of the Japanese immigrants and also the crime tendencies and depravities they had, which were distinguished from the main American population.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, this flies in the face of all studies that have shown that the crime rate among immigrant populations in the United States is actually lower than it is among ordinary American citizens, but yet this is attempting to take isolated incidents or particular crimes and sort of raise them to the level of a general trend, isn't it?

The Full Story (February 2, 2017)