By Chris Jennewein
Times of San Diego
SAN DIEGO –The German-language film The Zone of Interest, which won Oscars for both best international film and sound on Sunday, offers a warning for America in the campaign for the presidency.
The film focuses on a German family who lead a seemingly normal life just outside the death camp at Auschwitz, where thousands of people are being gassed every day. Auschwitz was just one of thousands of camps across Europe where the Nazis held — and killed — millions of Jews, Gypsies, communists, gays and other people they considered undesirable.
Donald Trump, in his third campaign for the presidency, is also thinking about camps — and demonizing those who would be incarcerated.
“We have to deport a lot of people, and they have to start immediately,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview from Eagle Pass, Texas, last month
He has accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” using a phrase that echoes the Nazis. And like them, he plans to use the military and local police to round up people.
“It’s going to be the local police are going to turn them over, and we’re going to have to move them back to their country,” Trump said to a sympathetic Hannity.
And those arrested would be placed in huge camps built by the military while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.
Will this become a “Zone of Interest” moment for Americans? How will we react if an estimated 11 million undocumented individuals are arrested and placed in giant camps prior to deportation? Will our lives go on as if nothing happened?
Consider that the scale of Trump’s plans dwarf anything America has experienced.
During World War II, over 125,000 citizens of Japanese descent were moved to 75 makeshift internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was an “unconstitutional resort to racism,” as one Supreme Court justice wrote in 1945 when the camps were closed.
In the early 1950s, under President Eisenhower, over 1 million Mexicans were deported in the crudely named Operation Wetback that historians say was prompted largely by xenophobia.
But Trump is planning something much, much bigger. As Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told the Washington Post:
“Americans can expect that immediately upon President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, he will … marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history.”
She added that undocumented immigrants “should not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home.”
If Trump’s team is really planning to deport 11 million people, it will be hard not to notice. Image the level of construction required to build the camps, the widespread immigration raids, and the impact on the economy when so many workers vanish. Will police interrupt your restaurant dinner to arrest the busboy? Knock on your door to ask about the gardener? Take away your aging parent’s caregiver?
Of course, there are all kinds of practical reasons not to deport migrants, but to instead give them a path to citizenship. Unemployment is at a record low and many industries are begging for workers. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal has cited high immigration as the reason why America’s economy is growing faster than any other Western nation.
But Trump’s plans have nothing to do with practicality or economics. Like the Japanese internment, it’s all about racism and fear. And it will be interesting if Americans behave like the family in “The Zone of Interest.”
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Chris Jennewein is editor and publisher of Times of San Diego, with which San Diego Jewish World trades stories under auspices of the San Diego Online News Association.