Sessions: We’re Not Like The Nazis Because They Tried To Keep Jews From Leaving
Image by Getty Images
By Aiden Pink June 19, 2018
Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticized the growing number of public comparisons between the Trump administration’s new immigration policies and Nazi Germany, saying that such claims are not true because the Nazis were “keeping the Jews from leaving the country.”
More than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents at border crossings and placed in detention centers, according to the Department of Homeland Security. But even as Holocaust survivors as well as Democratic politicians drew parallels between World War II and today, Sessions rejected the comparison in an interview on Fox News on Monday.
“Well, it’s a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country,” Sessions said. “We need to think it through, be rational and thoughtful about it. We want to allow asylum for people who qualify for it, but people who want economic migration for their personal financial benefit, and what they think is their families’ benefit, is not a basis for a claim of asylum.”
Sessions’s claim that the Nazis kept the Jews from leaving elides the fact that the Nazis did deport roughly 17,000 Jews from Germany to Poland in 1938, and that they contemplated forcibly moving the entire European Jewish population to Madagascar.
Sessions went on to admit that the point of the new policy was to deter further illegal immigration.
“I see that the fact that no one was being prosecuted for this as a factor in a five-fold increase in four years in this kind of illegal immigration,” he said. “So, yes, hopefully, people will get the message and come through the border at the port of entry, and not break across the border unlawfully.”
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
