Moreover, even those who want to liken the present moment to, let’s say, the rise of Nazi rule in Germany and say they’re doing so to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust are doing something very wrong. By likening the Jews of Germany to the South Americans on the border, they are implicitly accepting the Nazi contention that Jewish Germans were foreign presences rather than German citizens whose very existences on the earth were slowly and systematically being outlawed by the government of the country in which they were born.

Hitler wanted all Jews dead. Trump wants non-Americans who are here in violation of US law out of the United States. Dislike that all you wish. I do. I do not think this is the right policy. But it’s not the systematic elimination of the Other.

When you make such an argument, you are lowering and lessening and making more invisible as time passes the unthinkable and unimaginable scope and size of the Shoah.