Hitler was able to rise into power, in part, because of how he was able to explain away the problems of German society through scapegoating. It was always someone else’s fault. The people needed to be united together, to let their noble and glorious heritage shine forth as they took what was rightfully theirs, letting no one stop them from attaining their proper place of power in the world. While his rhetoric affected a diverse group of people, such as homosexuals and gypsies, his main target of disgust was the Jews. He did all that he could do to create a vision of the Jews as dangerous, good-for-nothing, traitors, who were conspiring together to keep the German people down. He helped unleash the anti-Semitic hatred which had been brooding in Germany for centuries, exploiting, whenever he could, any and every crime committed by someone who happened to be a Jew as justification for that hate. The Jews were degraded by all kinds of unjust generalization. They were the problem which had to be overcome, and to deal with that problem, Hitler came up with the “final solution” of the Holocaust.
In the United States, we now face similar rhetoric coming from people in positions of authority speaking out and attacking immigrants. Whether or not such immigrants are documented, many of them are finding themselves attacked, their human dignity derided, all because of the accident of their birth and not for anything which they have themselves done. All the good which they have done, such as service in the military, is ignored as they are thrown out of the country, with all justification for this treatment coming from the propagandists which seek to make all immigrants, documented or not, appear to be dangerous criminals who have to be dealt with swiftly before they destroy the United States.
This is why every time an immigrant, especially an undocumented immigrant, does some great harm to society, demagogues do not look at the situation with its own particular and unique circumstances which say nothing about any other immigrants, but rather as an excuse to continue the dehumanization of all immigrants making them seem to be the same as anyone who commits a terrible crime. The newest example of this comes out of Indianapolis. Colts linebacker Edwin Jackson, and Uber driver Jeffrey Monroe were killed in an accident involving a drunk driver who happened to be an undocumented immigrant. Once this came to light, the response is as expected: the driver is being used to judge all immigrants, documented or not, and to dehumanize them, suggesting that they are all dangerous, requiring the United States to take a tough stand on immigration. The generalization which Hitler used against the Jews to justify the Holocaust, we find, is what is slowly emerging in the American discussion about immigrants. The same brutality which the Jews faced, even before the Holocaust, is emerging in our society, as even documented immigrants find themselves detained, their family threatened if not also brutally treated, by ICE agents.
Justice demands all immigrants, no matter their status, be treated with human dignity, and the particular circumstances which brought them here kept in mind. Those who fled monstrous regimes in which they would have died if they remained should not be forced back to their death, repeating the crimes of the United States as it sent back many Jews to the Nazis. Catholic teaching requires us to treat others with respect to their humanity, and recognize justice is never being served by the rule of law if that law does not serve and protect human dignity. In this manner, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on Care for Migrants and Refugees stated in September 2017:
It is preposterous to claim that justice for immigrants isn’t central to Catholic teaching. It comes directly from Jesus Himself in Matthew 25, ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food…a stranger and you welcomed me.’ Immigrants and refugees are precisely the strangers we must welcome. This isn’t Catholic partisanship. The Bible is clear: welcoming immigrants is indispensable to our faith.
We must keep the dignity of the human person fist and foremost as we deal with immigrants. We must recognize the image and likeness of God in them and honor it. In this way, we will be honoring Jesus himself, just as Mother Teresa recognized Jesus in the poor in India. We must ask ourselves not only what would Jesus do, but what would we have done to Jesus? The answer, we will find, in seen in how we treat and deal with others.
We must not let the xenophobic campaign to demonize the other, to demonize immigrants (documented or not), to continue without opposition. We must not let the only image we have of the other be defined by those who would demonize them. We must not let them be generalized by those who do some wrong; we already know this in relation to ourselves, because we rarely let the criminals found in our society define who and what we are. We must not let it become believed that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than ordinary citizens, even as we must reject as unfounded the notion that undocumented immigrants commit more crimes than the rest of us.
The propaganda and rhetoric being used to justify backlash against immigrants parallels the rhetoric used by Hitler against the “enemies” of German society. We already see a change in society, so that, thanks to Trump’s rhetoric, we can find Arthur Jones, a racist, Holocaust denying Republican, becoming the official Republican candidate for a congressional seat in Illinois. It appears we have not learned the lesson of Hitler after all, and the banality of evil once again is before us.
As we find our nation sliding into greater chaos, as our economic standards decline (thanks to the poor direction of the President and Congress), we will find the scapegoats continue to be brought out to distract us from the real problem. The rule of law, which should be made to serve humanity and not the other way around, will be brutally enforced to the degradation of human dignity; when that is not good enough, more, tougher rules will be made.
As humanity finds itself in a crisis point, as the dignity of the human person risks being lost in the chaos, there is but one thing we must do.
We must resist.
[Image=Muslim Ban 2.0 Protest by By tedeytan (https://www.flickr.com/photos/taedc/32477581454/) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]
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