Introduction: Historical Analogies Gone Awry

In recent years, some activists and commentators have drawn provocative parallels between Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews and modern United States immigration enforcement. Emotional slogans compare detention centers to “camps” and immigration agents to fascist police. “Remember, other governments put kids in camps” is a rallying cry heard in immigration debates. Such analogies seek to invoke the moral horror of the Holocaust in contemporary policy arguments. Yet the comparison is historically and morally flawed. It oversimplifies a complex genocide into a catch-all metaphor and ignores crucial differences in context and intent.

While it is understandable that people react strongly to perceived injustices, equating U.S. immigration enforcement with the Nazi genocide of European Jewry is inaccurate and inappropriate. The Holocaust was a state-orchestrated campaign of systematic mass murder, targeting an entire ethnic group that had been part of German society for centuries. In contrast, U.S. immigration laws are aimed at regulating entry and residence in the country, not at exterminating a people. Drawing this false equivalence distorts history and, as Holocaust historians warn, “grossly simplified Holocaust analogies” demean the memory of the victims. A cold, factual look at the history reveals why the Holocaust analogy in this context is misguided.

Legal Citizens Turned Victims in Nazi Germany

German Jews in the 1930s were not foreigners or illegal entrants. They were fellow citizens, often highly assimilated into German life. The Nazi regime, upon coming to power in 1933, made it a cornerstone of policy to redefine and ostracize this native minority. Anti-Jewish laws swiftly accumulated. Jews were expelled from civil service, barred from various professions, and subjected to violence. Crucially, in 1935 the Nazis enacted the notorious Nuremberg Laws, which changed the legal status of Jews in Germany and provided a veneer of lawfulness to persecution. The Reich Citizenship Law, one of the two Nuremberg Laws, stripped German Jews of their German citizenship outright. Where once they had been Germans by birth, they were now legally reduced to “subjects” of the state with no claim to rights or protection. In the Nazis’ own chilling terms, it transformed “German Jews” into “Jews in Germany,” turning a nationality into a mark of outsider status.

Under this new racist legal framework, simply being Jewish was effectively criminalized and treated as a threat to the Aryan community. The Nuremberg Laws and subsequent decrees forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans,” criminalizing normal social interactions. Jews could not fly the national flag and eventually were forced to wear a yellow star, marking them publicly as undesirables. All of this was “legal” under Nazi law, demonstrating how a totalitarian regime can change the law itself to persecute a segment of its own citizens. The Jewish community, including men, women, and children who were German by birth, was dehumanized in the eyes of the law. They were rendered defenseless. They were stripped of citizenship, property rights, and any recourse to justice. This perversion of law laid the groundwork for the escalating abuses that led to the Holocaust. It is within this context of state-sanctioned racial persecution of legal citizens that Nazi concentration camps and genocidal policies emerged.

U.S. Immigration Law and Enforcement: A Legal Framework

Modern U.S. immigration enforcement operates in an entirely different context, under the rule of law in a constitutional democracy. U.S. immigration policy is not based on ethnic or religious ideology, but on legal status. Individuals who cross the border without authorization or overstay visas are violating immigration statutes. This is a civil or at times criminal offense defined by law. For example, 8 U.S.C. §1325 explicitly makes “improper entry” into the United States by an alien a federal offense. In other words, U.S. law distinguishes between those with legal right to enter and remain and those without, irrespective of their identity. Enforcement agencies like the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are charged with upholding these laws through procedures such as detention and deportation. While these measures are often contentious and can be harsh, they stem from a legal framework that presumes due process and the possibility of legal appeal, not from an ideology of extermination.

Significantly, U.S. immigration enforcement actions are based on what people have done, such as unlawfully entering or remaining, rather than who they are. There is no comparison between a democracy enforcing border laws and a fascist state redefining its own citizens as subhuman enemies. ICE’s mission statement encapsulates the pragmatic aim. It is to “identify and apprehend removable aliens, detain these individuals and remove illegal aliens from the United States.” This is fundamentally about law enforcement. Immigration detention centers, for all their serious problems, are not intended as instruments of terror or death. There is no American “Nuremberg Law” singling out a race for second-class status, and there are no American policies aimed at annihilating a people. Comparing immigration law enforcement to the Holocaust ignores the presence of legal checks, the absence of a hateful racist doctrine from official law, and the profoundly different end goals. In the U.S. system, enforcement is ultimately aimed at removing individuals from the country or regulating their status. It is not aimed at dehumanizing and destroying an internal population.

Totalitarian Tactics: Propaganda, Fear, and False Equivalence

The Nazi regime maintained power and public compliance through intensive propaganda that distorted emotions, morality, and truth to serve its agenda. A hallmark of totalitarian propaganda is the deliberate whipping up of fear and hate to justify extreme policies. In Hitler’s Germany, Jews were incessantly portrayed as a dangerous “other.” Nazi propaganda outlets flooded the public with dehumanizing imagery and language. Jews were depicted as disease-carrying vermin and parasites undermining the nation from within. At the same time, contradictory propaganda painted Jews in human terms as sinister villains. They were called “enemies,” “criminals,” and “traitors,” supposedly plotting against Germany. This dual strategy of portraying Jews as both subhuman and supremely cunning enemies stoked irrational fear. Ordinary Germans were emotionally conditioned to see their Jewish neighbors not as fellow humans, but as an existential threat. Scapegoating was the order of the day. The Nazi state blamed Jews for Germany’s every economic hardship and social struggle, channeling public anger toward a vulnerable target. By exploiting prejudice and anxieties, the regime created a unified “national community” defined largely by its hatred of an internal enemy.

Totalitarian propaganda also relies on moral false equivalence and outright lies to consolidate power. The Nazi leadership crafted a warped moral narrative in which their own aggression was presented as righteous self-defense. They equated the elimination of Jews with the notion of national “cleansing” or public health, as if genocide were a reasonable prophylactic measure. This is a clear example of false equivalence. It portrays innocent victims as if they were the moral equivalent of a deadly disease or a criminal conspiracy. Such propaganda turns reality on its head. Cruelty is painted as necessity. Nazi propagandists also practiced the “Big Lie” technique, a concept Adolf Hitler described with cynical insight. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility.” People will more readily believe a colossal untruth because they “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods” themselves. The Nazi regime put this into practice by relentlessly repeating gross falsehoods about Jews. Over time, the constant drumbeat of lies, protected by censorship and the silencing of dissent, normalized the unimaginable. Emotional appeals, false moral narratives, and brazen lies were fused together to serve one purpose. They sought to secure and expand the Nazi party’s power by manufacturing an enemy and justifying any measures taken against them.

Twisting Holocaust History: Propaganda Tactics in Modern Politics

Invoking the Holocaust as a political analogy in contemporary debates is a form of historical distortion that carries its own dangers. Comparing U.S. immigration enforcement to Nazi genocidal practices is not just a logical fallacy. It recycles the kind of false equivalence and emotional manipulation seen in authoritarian propaganda. The analogy creates a misleading narrative. It suggests that government agents carrying out immigration law are essentially the same as SS officers rounding up families for death camps. This is a morally false equivalence. However harsh U.S. immigration detention may be, the U.S. government “is not committing mass murder; it is not liquidating communities; it is not committing genocide.” To suggest otherwise is to profoundly skew reality. Using the Holocaust as a rhetorical weapon in this way exploits historical suffering to score political points. It relies on shock value by harnessing the emotional weight of Nazi atrocities, rather than engaging with the specific facts of current issues. In effect, it is a propaganda tactic. It appeals to emotion and outrage while sidestepping nuance.

Holocaust survivors, scholars, and institutions have cautioned against these facile comparisons. They understand that such analogies belittle the Jewish experience under Nazi terror by treating it as a handy political metaphor rather than the uniquely horrific event it was. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has explicitly warned that invoking Nazi comparisons cheapens public discourse and “demeans the memory of the dead.” When political actors twist Holocaust history to serve an agenda, they unwittingly mirror the tactics of authoritarian regimes. They bend truth, inflame emotions, and create false moral equivalences to sway the public. This kind of distortion erodes honest discussion and disrespects both past and present. History’s darkest chapters, like the Holocaust, should inform our moral compass, but they must be studied with integrity, not manipulated into partisan slogans. In confronting modern injustices, we can and must do so without distorting historical truth. The Nazi genocide of the Jews stands in a category of its own. Remembering it accurately honors the victims and guards against real abuses of power. Misappropriating it only adds falsehood to our debates and belittles the very real suffering that history records.

Sources:

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – “Why Holocaust Analogies Are Dangerous”ushmm.org
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia – “Nuremberg Laws”encyclopedia.ushmm.org
• National Archives (Prologue Magazine) – Bradsher, Greg. “The Nuremberg Laws”archives.gov
• El País (English) – Carbajosa, Ana. “How Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews to facilitate the Holocaust”english.elpais.com
• Propwatch.org – “Propaganda Techniques: scapegoating”propwatch.org
• Jewish Virtual Library – “Joseph Goebbels on the ‘Big Lie’” (quoting Adolf Hitler)jewishvirtuallibrary.org
• ICE – “How ICE Enforces Immigration Laws” (ICE.gov fact sheet)ice.gov
• U.S. Department of Justice – 8 U.S.C. §1325, Unlawful Entry (Justice Manual)justice.gov
• The Forward – Schwartz, Avigayil. “Stop Comparing Immigrant Deportations to the Holocaust”forward.com