Ending a contract with an agency that runs concentration camps is good. Better, though, is to not accept any contracts with any government that runs concentration camps.
Small steps are good. Big steps are better.
PS: great fear from all paying customers that run concentration camps that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time -- sounds like a good policy to me. Not as good as "Don't be evil", but reasonably close.
> Concentration Camps: A place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners
>A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group the government has identified as suspect.
I would also note that the term does not apply to places where people in Nazi Germany were gassed or cremated, those have a separate term: death camps.
Japanese internment camps from WW2 easily meet that definition.
I think immigration detention centers easily meet that definition too: they hold large numbers of individuals whose only crime is being “the other”.
According to your definition, a concentration camp is an "internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment.."
People of certain minority groups aren't being rounded up. Illegal immigrants are being rounded up, regardless of race or nationality.
I'm not saying whether that's right or wrong, I'm just saying that calling them concentration camps is hyperbolic and uproductive.
It's not hyperbolic and unproductive, it's the plain truth, just like the Japanese concentration camps during WW2.
Maybe the term isn't the problem and the policy you are trying to defend is
I'm not fine with hyperbole. It causes unnecessary arguments and deadens people to extreme viewpoints. Reality is bad enough to cause political change as long as attention is brought to it.
Due process is the method that a society uses to determine whether people should be punished. The concentration camps under discussion do not hold people who have been adjudicated and condemned; they hold people who have been accused.
I've made a similar mistaken before, and been called out on it.
If ICE could be trusted to care for those in its care [1] or respect the legal rights of immigrants [2] then, maybe it would be unfair. How many children need to die in custody before "concentration camp" stops being hyperbolic?
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2019/12/19/ice...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-11-15/asylum-off...
If ending contract with an agency that runs concentration camp has any meaningful impact on said agency, the only thing you achieve is making their service a bit worse and life of people in their custody a bit miserable.
That's the opposite of good, you're just hurting people you supposedly care about.
"Being illegally present in the U.S. has always been a civil, not criminal, violation of the INA[Immigration and Naturalization Act]"
"Criminal violations of the INA, on the other hand, include felonies and misdemeanors and are prosecuted in federal district courts. These types of violations include the bringing in and harboring of certain undocumented aliens, aliens (INA §275), ..."
As can already be deduced from the above, illegal entry is a misdemeanor. Only the bringing in, harbouring, and certain specific aggravation conditions raise it to a felony.
Yes, it would be wrong if there was not a justified basis for it.
Whether there's a justified basis for interning all people formally labelled as criminals in the USA I'll leave as an exercise, because it's obviously complicated there. So many people are imprisoned in the USA compared with other countries that it seems reasonable to doubt whether it is all justified, or even smart for those who remain outside.
When it comes to interning people who have few choices in life and are doing nothing of significant harm except being somewhere, and in a significant fraction of cases they have been there since birth or near birth, I see no justice-based justification for that.
Immigration detention centres have many of the awful qualities of prison, but the inmates there have not been subject to due process, and do not have a fixed term to serve out. These are qualities that make them more like a concentration camp.
At best, you could say the detention is politically-based to a much greater degree than criminal justice. This is obvious because detention is based on bureaucracy, what mood an official is in when they make a decision, and a person's background which they cannot do anything about, rather than the higher standard of criminal due process based on personal behaviour and trained, scrutinised judges; and because changes of political direction and secondary legislation (i.e. regulations made by beaurocrats, rather than laws) significantly change who is rounded up and released.
So if it's not justified as a prison, and does not have the qualities we associate with justice, and is selecting people based on their background they can do nothing about.... yes, that makes it meet the definition of a concentration camp IMHO.
But we don't call them concentration camps because that's not a good look, due to association with gas chambers and death trains, which to be fair ICE is not known for. We call them detention centres and avoid thinking about what that really means for the people and their families. Which if you think about it, sounds familiar from history...
> According to your definition, a concentration camp is an "internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment.."
> People of certain minority groups aren't being rounded up. Illegal immigrants are being rounded up, regardless of race or nationality.
The _concentration_ part is missing. Without condoning anything of whatever wrongdoing ICE is doing all the people detained decided personally to embark in a trip that involved that risk.
Concentration camps need to have a concept of raking up a chunk of the population and removing them from society, as in concentrating a part of the population. Prisons are more of a concentration camp than ICE detention centers.
Concentration camps were not solely the purview of the Nazis, and already had quite the history before they even came on the scene. In fact, while we're on the topic of World War II, the US government held people of Japanese decent in concentration camps during that war - which perhaps partly explains there's such an aggressive effort to make those camps a "Nazi thing".
The rest of the world doesn't have any obligation to help you hide from facing and interrogating your own history.
As a result, calling whatever ICE is doing "concentration camps" doesn't make sense in the American context, unless maybe you're an academic or specialist speaking to there academics or specialists. And it's actually worse than "doesn't make sense in the American context", since it makes people who are only familiar with the American understanding of the term think that you are a deranged ideologue. And that's bad for discourse and finding a shared understanding, which I think we can all agree is a good thing.
If internment camp does not convey that then I think using a technically correct term such as concentration camp to ensure that people pay attention to these abuses is not just technically correct it actually conveys that this is more than "just" an internment camp.
If Americans do generally associate internment camp with that then fair enough call them internment camps in general conversation.
No, I don't think that works.
What is the purpose of such a technical distinction for this discussion?
Also misdemeanors are still considered serious crimes. I don't get where this hand-waving "because it's just a misdemeanor" comes from.
How certain are you that Canadian refugees (for example) in equivalent numbers would be subjected to similar treatment and held in similar conditions?
The IRS uses the term "undocumented alien," which is kind of a weird, mixed construction, referring to people as "aliens" (which I always find weird, but, okay), but not "illegal." [2]
Other government agencies, and, yes, immigration advocates, use the term "undocumented immigrant," which has the virtue of both being accurate, and not referring to individuals as "illegal," when the thing that's actually illegal is the fact that they are in the country without authorization (the "undocumented" part).
In summary, "illegal alien" as a term of art: fine in my book, just weird. "Undocumented alien": sure, if you're the IRS. But, otherwise, "undocumented immigrant" is the most technically accurate, because it's not the person who is illegal, as the word "illegal" modifying "immigrant" in the phrase would indicate, but their presence in the country that is illegal.
[0]: https://www.heritage.org/immigration/commentary/undocumented...
[1]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/may/09/steve-mccr...
[2]: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/immi...
“undocumented alien” is arguably more accurate; alien is just a (somewhat dated outside of law) term for a foreigner, “immigrant” has further meaning of seeking to make the country their permanent home, which is not always the case for foreigners present without current documentation of legal presence.
But hey, if you optimise for immediate feeling of righteousness and moments of back-patting, there is no reason to overcomplicate things.