In June 2019, when the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to US immigration detention camps in Texas and elsewhere – where frightened children were separated from their parents (who were often eventually deported without them) – as ‘concentration camps’, it created a public outcry. Ocasio-Cortez used a term that was not only straightforwardly descriptive, in her view, but invoked an analogy with the Nazi concentration camps of the Second World War. The analogy itself was flawed, and didn’t teach us anything new about history. But it captured something essential about the banal evil that makes the link between the 1940s and our era so plausible and alarming.
Ocasio-Cortez, like the many historians who attested to the merits of her statement, knows perfectly well that we are not living in Nazi Germany and that the migrants in Texas are not sent to gas chambers, for example. But her analogy (which she made implicitly, since she never mentioned the Nazis) serves as a stark reminder that concentration camps have a long history, one that included (and predates) the Nazi genocide of European Jews; that the US is no stranger to the history of concentration camps; and that its Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) detention camps are in fact the latest iteration of that global history. She also reminded us that the historical crimes of fascism took place while most of the public continued living their lives in normal, mundane ways. Her analogy is also a sort of call to action: understanding ICE camps as concentration camps means refusing to minimalise them, and seeing them as morally unacceptable, with all that this entails.
So historical analogies, done in good faith, can make crucial points about the present and help to clarify where we stand on moral and political issues. The problem begins when we begin to substitute historical analogies for historical analysis – or, even more problematically, when we come to believe that history ‘repeats itself’. This sort of cliché has become a bane of our public discourse, especially regarding the sorry state of the US.
We can say that ICE’s detention camps are part of the longer history of concentration camps, and that they evoke the history of fascist regimes. We cannot say that European fascism of the interwar years is the reason that the US has concentration camps in 2020, or why ICE behaves the way it does today. Nor is saying that ICE follows in some US ‘tradition’ any kind of historical explanation. Xenophobia and nationalism are not physical things that travel through time. They have no agency. To explain ICE, we need to account for recent history, viewing its customs and power as products of a historical process. We should ask: what causes this migration in the first place? What responsibility does the US bear for the arrival of desperate asylum-seekers at its borders? Who created, funded and empowered ICE, and for what reasons? US racism of the past is not an explanation. To paraphrase the historian Barbara Fields, racism is something that we create anew, every day. Who, or what, creates racism in our own day? Under what conditions do racism and xenophobia thrive?