There are people who have urged us to steer clear of immigration and stick to subjects where we can be more sure of public support, such as tariffs and Medicaid cutbacks. Gavin Newsom initially dismissed the issue as a "distraction" from economic issues. Matthew Yglesias has made similar arguments.
I am, in general, in favor of Democrats focusing on issues that play well with the public and steering clear of the sort of niche or boutique issues that just make Democrats look out of touch. Tariffs and Medicaid cuts are examples of issues that Democrats should emphasize because they can count on pubic opinion backing them.
But there are some moral issues that admit no compromise. Trump's current immigration policy is one such instance. In deciding what is a mere policy dispute and what allows no compromise, I think it fair to apply the Niemoller test -- "First they came for . . . " And yes, I absolutely believe that such analogies get thrown around a bit loosely, so maybe we should consider what Niemoller's actual background was.
Wikipedia level sketch: Niemoller was a Lutheran pastor and a conservative. He voted for the Nazis in 1924, 1928, and 1933, welcoming 1933 ascent to power. He believed that Jews as a religious group deserved persecution, but also that a Jew who was baptized as a Christian was immediately freed of such a taint. As such, he opposed discriminatory measures against baptized Jews and Nazi attempts to subordinate Protestant churches to Nazism.* In 1934 he was one of the co-founders of the Confessing Church, established to resist the Nazis' interference in church matters and to protest the refusal to recognize Jews who converted to Christianity as true Christians. He was arrested in 1937 and sent to Dachau in 1938.
So, treating 1937 as "and then they came for me," how bad had things gotten by then? I have written a little before about the early stages. First they came for the Communists. Hitler was named Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Within days he took over the Prussian police, deputized the Brown Shirts, and authorized them to shoot Communists mobs on sight. On February 27, the Reichstag burned down. The cabinet issued an emergency decree banning the Communist Party and authorizing the arrest of political opponents and closing of opposition newspapers. On March 5, new elections were held and Nazis did better than ever before. The next day, Nazis forcibly seized state government buildings and arrested political opponents by the tens of thousands. On March 23, the Reichstag handed Hitler emergency powers, effectively voting itself out of existence.
Dachau was opened on March 22, the day before the Reichstag handed over the keys to Hitler, as a makeshift prison in a munitions factory to house political opponents, who has been arrested in such numbers as to exceed the capacity of existing prisons. There were already reports of torture and murder there by April, and even an attempt at prosecution (suppressed by the authorities).
Then they came for the homosexuals. Niemoller did not, as far as I know, ever name gays as a target. As a conservative Christian, he would have thoroughly disapproved of their lifestyle. Homosexuality was illegal in Weimar, but the laws were not widely enforced. It remained illegal in West Germany after the Nazis were defeated, so gays were not as quick to speak up as other persecuted groups. The suppression of gay bars, clubs, and publications began at once, with the wide approval of conservatives, religious and secular. Ordinary gays at first continued their lives as long as the kept a low profile. This changed in mid-1934 with the execution of Ernst Roehm, the gay leader of the Storm Troopers. An estimated 100,000 gay men were arrested and torture was routinely used to extort confessions. Some were imprisoned for years and an estimated 5-6,000 were sent to concentration camps and had a death rate of 60%. The scale of the persecution strained police resources, but the pressure for arrests was so strong that some police departments resorted to calling in entire classes of teenage boys and asking them about their sexual experiences.
Some versions of Niemoller do name Jehovah's Witnesses. Because Jehovah's witnesses refused to serve in the miliary or Nazi organizations. By mid-1933, their press was closed down, their publications burned, and their meetings banned. Jehovah's Witnesses were fired from government jobs for refusing to take a loyalty oath. By 1935 and 1936, Jehovah's Witnesses were having their cars and bicycles seized, being evicted from their homes, having their children taken, and being imprisoned. Some 2,000 were sent to concentration camps.
Then they came for the Jews. It began with discrimination, not violence. The Reichstag handed Hitler absolute power on March 23, 1933. In April, Jews and Communists were barred from government employment. Civil service protections were stripped from anyone hired under the Weimar government. Jews were also barred from practicing law, and the national health service stopped paying Jewish doctors. (Patients could still pay out of pocket). Jewish students were limited to 1.5% of total enrollment -- their proportionate share of the population. In July, 150,000 naturalized Jews were stripped of their citizenship and deported. In September, Jew were barred from owning farmland (not that many did in the first place). Jews were also barred from producing works of culture. In 1935, the Nuremburg laws stripped Jews of their citizenship. Jews were also barred from marriage or sex with Germans (existing marriages were allowed to stand), from employing German women under 45, and from flying the German flag.
In 1938, things became significantly worse. Jews were forbidden from practicing medicine even for private payment, from having gardens, from attending theaters, opera, or concerts, or from public schools. Kristallnacht took place on November 9-10, 1938. After a deported Jew assassinated a German diplomat in Paris, a "spontaneous" pogrom led by the secret police broke out -- mass vandalism and looting of Jewish property, 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps, and an undetermined number of murders and other acts of personal violence. This was the first act of widespread violence against Jews under the Nazis. Mass murder began only after the war, and specifically after Hitler invaded Russia.
It should also be noted that the events of 1938 took place after Niemoller had been arrested (1937). So, at the time Niemoller was arrested, the organized opposition had been fully suppressed and thousands send to Dachau. Thousands of gay men had been arrested, to the point of interfering with police ability to handle ordinary crime. Jehovah's Witnesses were facing economic persecution and some arrests for refusing military service. Jews were being barred from most desirable jobs and many had been deported, but widespread violence had not yet begun. In other words, things had not yet reached the level of the Holocaust. But many Germans did realistically have to fear the knock in the night.
And so the question really has to be, not whether we are facing gas chambers, but whether we are facing the knock in the night. And for immigrants in this country -- legal and illegal like -- the answer has to be yes. We are seeing random immigrations sweeps, people being arrested when they make routine check-ins with their immigration officers, at people being arrested in immigration court, the deliberate refusal to identify where people are being held, arrests of citizens making any attempt to protect immigrants, an over 200 men shipped off to a prison in El Salvador that boasts that no one leaves alive. And now military forces sent to Los Angeles.
In fact, I heard a most alarming comment on a recent podcast. The commenter remarked that many people compare Trump to Orban and ask if he had gone as far. And plenty of things Trump has done, such as his attacks on the independence of the civil service, universities, and elite law firms, seem Orbanesque. But Orban never went so far as ICE is going today. Maybe Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is a better point of comparison.
*The Catholic Church, due to its transnational structure, was a tougher nut to crack.
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