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.
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...
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.
What is the purpose of such a technical distinction for this discussion?
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.