Where does the discrimination lead?

Norman Emond
Charlestown
To the Editor:

The recent caging of children, splitting up, deporting, and imprisoning of families seeking asylum in the U.S., along with other, continuing, criminal atrocities committed by agents of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) is reminiscent of the atrocities of Nazi Germany. In “Hitler’s American Model; The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017), James Q. Whitman accounts for the U.S. influence on the formulation of Nazi race laws, policies and practices.

Whitman had discovered a transcript from 1934 providing evidence that Nazi lawyers drew from “The Immigration Act of 1924” (The Johnson-Reed Act)1 conditioning entry to the United States on race-based criteria masked as “national origin.” Hitler praised this U.S. law in his autobiography, “Mein Kampf.” The Nazi Commission on Criminal Law Reform applied U.S. Jim Crow laws2 to the German Jewish population to formulate “The Nuremberg Laws”3.

Following the continuum from the genocide of Native American peoples, enslavement of African peoples, to the ‘New Jim Crow’4. of the U.S. corporate prison industry — enslavement by another name— one has to wonder, who will be next?

“May we find our humanity”

 

Norman Emond

Charlestown

 

1 Signed into law by then-president Calvin Coolidge of Vermont. See “Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History” (www.uvm.edu/~eugenics/overviewf.html) for context.

2 State and local laws enacted in the southern states of the U.S. (1877-1965) mandating segregation and disempowerment of all African Americans; reviving the Black Codes of 1865-6, and instituted as law in the southern states, prevailing de facto in the northern states.

3 See www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/background-and-overview-of-the-nuremberg-laws

4 “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander (The New Press, 2012)