AOC Wasn't Wrong About Concentration Camps

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive member of the U.S. Congress, has likened the U.S. government’s immigrant detention facilities on the Mexican border to concentration camps and is unapologetic about it even in the face of a reprimand from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust research center. Her remarks were clearly meant to provoke; but were they entirely wrong? AOC, as Ocasio-Cortez is called, provides a reminder that concentration camps have been more common in history than many think.

In the modern consciousness, the term “concentration camp” is firmly linked to the Nazis. Their practice, of course, was geared toward hard labor, torture and extermination. These were often explicit goals. Comparing U.S. immigration detention to the Nazi camps would be an impossible and unconscionable stretch, as anyone who’s ever been to Nazi concentration camp sites will attest.