I’m not surprised that Jack Holmes’ article on applying the terminology of concentration camps to the Trump administration’s migrant border facilities has reached something of a critical mass as a public discussion point. It’s been retweeted and commented on by Democratic Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, which in turn provoked a predictable and telling response from Republican Congressperson Liz Cheney; a few weeks on, it remains part of the fabric of discussions about the border crisis.
Holmes spoke with scholars of concentration camps about the detention of migrants who’ve crossed the southern border, and both he and these experts make the case that concentration camps are exactly what the U.S. is running. But as fascinating, provocative, and horrifying as the article’s argument is in and of itself, it should also provoke a reckoning with basic questions of language and politics that are central to our Trumpian moment. Many people of good conscience and deep opposition to the Trump administration will likely hear the term “concentration camp” applied to what are commonly called migrant shelters or detainment facilities, and think that this is going too far. After all, Dachau was a concentration camp, and the U.S. government is not working immigrants to death or gassing them. The language may seem to them incendiary, and the more philosophically-minded might make the case that such overstatement of the case actually gives the Trump administration more latitude for further cruelties against detainees. In fact, this is a rough account of my own thought process when I saw the article’s headline —and I don’t think I’m alone.
But reading the article changed my mind. It did so by providing context for what the United States is doing by comparing it to the actions of other countries, by detailing the conditions and treatment of migrants within the camps, and by laying out definitions of what concentration camps are by those who study them. Here’s a powerful sample:
“Not every concentration camp is a death camp — in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning. Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions [. . .] systems like these have emerged across the world for well over 100 years, and they've been established by putative liberal democracies—as with Britain's camps in South Africa during the Boer War—as well as authoritarian states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.”
That first line chills me every time I read it, and for good reason: it hits on the way that I think most of us too naively believe evil always shows up in full, recognizable form, and how instead a complex interaction of factors — individual malfeasance, bureaucratic inertia, indifference, and a failure of the public imagination — can build into catastrophes that no moral person would hesitate to condemn. The article goes on to make two key points: one, that the U.S. detention system fits under commonly understood definitions of concentration camps; and two, that there is every reason to worry that conditions will deteriorate beyond even this early point of immoral treatment of the detainees, with or without deliberate choices by the Trump administration to make things worse.
I don’t think any Democratic politician can walk away from the article and in good faith not refer to the facilities as concentration camps, as both a matter of accuracy and of ending them. But at the same time, such powerful language will be most effective as a weapon in the fight to end these detention practices if it’s accompanied by some version of the context the article provides. Otherwise, what could be deeply effective in changing the debate might contribute to the same propagandized language environment that benefits the president; of which, in fact, he is a master.
Donald Trump would seem to do the opposite of what I’m advising: indeed, the Trump years have been an object lesson in the power of language to shape people’s perceptions of reality, and more specifically, in the way that language can be used to pervert perceptions of reality. At the most extreme, he empowers himself by calling things what they are NOT, and asking people to share his vision. Migrants are vermin; Mexicans are rapists; immigration is invasion. More broadly, he uses language not to accurately describe reality, but to arouse various emotions — anger, fear, envy — to gain political support. He incites, he manipulates, he deceives.
But here’s one point that I’m trying to work through: obviously, I’m not saying Democrats should use the term “concentration camp” simply because it’s the most accurate term for the migrant facilities, but also because of its tremendous emotional connotations — its power to shock the conscience, change minds, and provoke political change. In fact, I would not be surprised if relatively few Democratic politicians follow Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s lead in employing this term in the immediate future, because of the perceived risks I mentioned above: fear of overstating the case in ways that provoke a backlash from otherwise persuadable voters, and that provide cover for further depredations by a Trump administration willing to point to full-on death camps as the only yardstick by which to measure its depraved actions.
While these aren’t unreasonable fears, they are symptomatic of larger difficulties around language and its relation to meaning that continue to dog the opposition. In politics, if you cannot bring yourself to call a thing what it is, or lack a word for that thing, then you are inevitably hobbled. On top of this, I think Democrats are rightly cautious to mimic the propagandistic language of Donald Trump. This is partly tied to their general approach to governance; unlike Trump, they are not working to stir up enmity against whole groups of people based on race, nationality, or religion, and so in basic ways have no need for such language. Put another way: the president largely plays to negative emotions that are, generally speaking, not applicable to Democratic politics, which are on the one hand generally more policy-driven, and on the other, rooted in coalition politics that can’t really be reconciled with the us-versus-them mentality behind much of the president’s hateful and provocative language. It is true that many Democrats feel anger and even hatred toward Trump, as well as at the voters who elected him and continue to approve of him in polls — but this animus at Trump voters isn’t supercharged by the same racialized and primal sentiment Trump would have his supporters direct towards the Democrats. At a pragmatic, electoral level, Democrats have not been willing to write off whole swathes of the electorate as Trump has (the president clearly sees a possible path to re-election that, as in 2016, does not require him to win the popular vote). At a moral level, Democrats don’t see hate as a legitimate basis for political appeals.
In the matter of the camps (and this is a conundrum that can be applied more broadly to the overall challenge of the Trump administration), the Democrats face two dangers: either understating or overstating their case. It will not surprise you when I say that, on the subject of migrant detention, understating the case is a political and moral failure for the Democrats, and a political win for the president. But how to avoid overstating the case?
The article I started off discussing offers some major clues. First, historical context is vital. The widespread phenomenon of concentration camps over the past century is deeply chilling, yet the silver lining (if we might call it that) is that there is a measurable baseline against which the U.S. camps can be measured. Put very basically: calling these sites “concentration camps” is more persuasive when the term isn’t just thrown out to provoke, but also to educate and illuminate. Particularly striking for me is how learning that concentration camps can encompass, but are not exclusively, death camps, in no way makes this terminology less politically and morally useful than thinking that only death camps qualify as concentration camps. Instead, the term captures a continuum of degradation, abuse, and potential horror rooted in real-world examples that can help focus shame and condemnation on current American practices. To make the obvious point: a camp doesn’t have to be Auschwitz to be horrific and unacceptable. For me, the larger matter in this moment is the way U.S. camps are undergirded by a basic disregard for human rights, a de facto strategy of dehumanization, and a legitimization via racism shared by past concentration camps. It doesn’t matter if these aren’t Nazi camps; what they’re intended to do is still evil, un-American, and unconscionable. No patriotic American would want to see their country defiled by such practices.
The use of incendiary language that twists basic facts and truths about the world is how the president propagates a myth about America and his place in it. As in his attempts to re-brand the 4th of July as a celebration of Donald Trump and how he saved America, his methods depend on excluding history, reality, and truth, except to the extent those things can be filtered through a distorting Trumpian prism that twists them into barely-recognizable forms. And so, on the immigration front, he dismisses vast swathes of individuated humanity as faceless, predatory hordes coming to take America’s wealth. There is no Latin America, with its various countries, their stories, and their individual and collective past relationships with the United States. There is also no acknowledgment of the billions upon billions of dollars of wealth contributed to our country by prior and current Latino migrants, documented or not, as they worked our fields and built our houses and cooked in our restaurants. Instead, below the Rio Grande is simply an amorphous blob of geography and humanity, who all mysteriously speak Mexican even though they’re not all from Mexico but who knows what other countries might be down there? The world south of the border is a punching bag, not a place, and all the humanity there faceless if not outright symbolic. As a danger that transcends history, any measures, not matter how cruel, are justified.
And so facts, historical context, and accurate language are how we break the myth-making. Just as the president is advantaged to the extent he is allowed to talk about migrants as if they are not individual human beings, and about Latin America as if it’s not an actual place, he’s also the beneficiary of the opposition’s failure to use the right words to describe his administration’s treatment of immigrants. If there is a case to be made that the Trump administration is running concentration camps, then Democrats need to make that case. The Democrats must do everything they can to rob immigration of the symbolic power Donald Trump has invested in it as the premier threat to the United States, both in order to defeat the infliction of cruelty, and to deny him the ability to blame all America’s ills on immigration.
Allowing immigration to dominate the political discussion will always be a net loss for Democrats, because the meta-message telegraphed to the electorate, rightly or wrongly, is that Democrats care more about protecting immigrants than working for American citizens. The president, even if he is lying and deeply misguided about his approach, is at least able to consistently articulate that he is inflicting pain on migrants in order to protect the United States. The Democrats’ case, in contrast, is that they are protecting migrants in order to actually protect the migrants, and secondarily in order to prevent the United States from inflicting on itself a moral and humanitarian catastrophe. The Democrats have an ethical imperative to do so; but they also need to figure out a way to simultaneously inflict maximum pain on the president, that holds his inhumanity to account.
They cannot stop the president from talking about immigration, but surely one way to neutralize him is to make sure the full story of immigration is being discussed: that it is an integral part of America’s history, and that the migration from south of the border has long been part of our development, and is not a terrifying new thing, but a situation to be managed without cruelty or terror. They can also make sure to highlight ties between the president’s white nationalist agenda and his war on brown people at the border. And fighting big lies doesn’t just require dramatic truths — the opposition shouldn’t afraid to appeal to pragmatism as well, and to make the case for how immigration helps us economically. We are already seeing how the president’s powerful lies are leading to measurable, real-world atrocities — countering them grows more urgent by the day.