HARLAN RICHARDS
January 12, 2018

DACA Immigrants Are The Jews of the 21st Century

A thought occurred to me a while back as I listened to the controversy over the DACA program (Displaced Alien Children Act). All of the Dreamers, as they are called, were required to register with the federal government to be exempt from deportation. They were safe as long as the government honored its promise not to deport them.

But when President Trump canceled the program (to take effect in 6 months), it changed everything. Unlike other illegal aliens, the government knows exactly who they are, where they are, and what they are doing. If DACA expires without action by Congress, the Dreamers will be in the same position as the European Jews under the Nazi occupation during World War II.

There's an interesting story about how the Nazis were able to round up and exterminate Jews so effectively, which can be found in the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. If not for the assistance of IBM corporation, the Holocaust could not have occurred.

Just like DACA, the Nazis initially required all Jews to register. The registration itself was not significant. It was what the Nazis did with the data that made all the difference. They had all data encoded on IBM punch cards and used IBM machines to sort the data. That's how they were able to compile lists of Jews all the way back to their grandparents. These lists were then used to round up the Jews and exterminate them.

It has been a while since I read the book, but if I remember correctly, IBM subsidiaries owed the machines used to compile the data and they were paid by Nazis for their work. The subdivisions held the profits until after the end of the war. They were then able to repatriate the funds back to the U.S.-based IBM corp. In those parts of Europe where the Nazis were not able to collect and process data using IBM machines, relatively fewer Jews were arrested and exterminated.

The parallel I see in the DACA program is how the U.S. government persuaded the alien children to come forward and register with guarantees of safety. The Nazis required Jews to register as a condition of remaining free in society. The difference in the comparison comes from how each situation plays out. The Nazis knew all along they were going to exterminate the Jews and acted with premeditation. When DACA was implemented, nobody could have predicted that a subsequent president was going to rescind the DACA program and then use the data collected to round up and deport the alien children.

I do not see the Republican-controlled Congress compromising on the Dreamers. After six months pass, President Trump will act on his own to fulfill another one of his campaign promises and deport hundreds of thousands of productive, contributing members of our society. In a country with a declining birth rate and a need for young workers to support our social security retirement system, Trump will be figuratively shooting the American people in the foot.