Why Trump Critics’ Hyperbolic Rhetoric on Deportations Denigrates Real Tragedies

Most of us no doubt recoil when the deportation of illegal aliens is compared to Naziism or fascism, especially when such comparisons come from elected officials who demand to be taken seriously as national leaders. Comparing ICE to a wicked ideology that died a fiery death a lifetime ago, or, for instance, likening a migrant detention center to a concentration camp, is an increasingly common tactic among elected Democrats and the millions of voters they influence. 

Such rhetoric is, among other things, an offence to victims of actual fascism as well as to those who were swept up by the many genuinely traumatic mass expulsions witnessed this past century. Critics of the administration’s immigration policies trivialize the memories of these victims with their ICE-is-the-Gestapo language, and opponents might benefit from knowing just how overblown such rhetoric really is.

Among the many horrors of the 20^th century, here are three examples of innocents being removed en masse that are truly appalling; genuinely dark episodes which, it is hoped, might provide Democrats, libertarians, and other critics with some historical perspective and a much-needed sense of balance:

The India-Pakistan Partition 

The 1947 partition of India was probably the largest one-time population transfer in history. Due to the region’s long, grinding history of ethnic and religious tension, that year, a whopping 14 million people on either side of what would be become India and Pakistan were forced to take up an ultimatum: Leave or die. As a 2020 piece in Time reflected:

The departing [British] colonialists, battered by the Second World War and facing a powerful independence movement in India, hastily drew a line on the map where there had not been one before. One side would become Hindu-majority India, the other Muslim-majority Pakistan… millions of Hindus and Sikhs living on the Pakistani side fled for India, and millions of Muslims traveled in the opposite direction. Bands of armed men on both sides of the new border raped and massacred the fleeing minorities. An estimated 14 million people were displaced, and between 1 and 2 million were killed.

Now that is a deportation to be horrified about. Genocidal in scope, focused on innocents, centuries-old villages emptied, this dark episode is one that should be held up to Democrats as actually deserving of the catastrophizing rhetoric they deploy today. 

Population Engineering in the Soviet Union

If anyone deserves to be called the opposite of a fascist, it’s Stalin. But according to Milica Zarkovic Bookman’s The Demographic Struggle For Power, Uncle Joe “resettled entire nationalities” throughout the Soviet empire; whole groups like Chechens and the Ingush (South Caucasus Muslims), the Karachai and Balkars (North Caucasus Muslims); the Kalmyuks (Mongolian-speaking Buddhists), and Crimean Tatars. Most were deported to other parts of the empire (often barely populated ones) officially for “suspicion” or “collaboration” with the Axis, due to their previous opposition to the Bolsheviks in the Civil War and later to collectivization. Less officially, they were moved to areas intended as giant slave camps or where another problematic group needed diluting.

The largest of these movements was the mass expulsion of around 10 million ethnic Germans from newly conquered Eastern Europe as well as so-called Volga Germans living within the Soviet Union itself. Bookman cites an academic who called the episode one of the most “horrific wartime and post war acts of demographic surgery.” Not only were the forced migrations often death sentences themselves, but what took place in the process was the largest mass rape in history: over a million women and girls sexually brutalized by Stalin’s Red Army. Again, this is a deportation actually worth screaming about. 

The Expulsion of Ottoman Greeks

This is another “move or die” removal of people who had been part of the land for centuries. Between 1914-1922, it’s estimated the Ottoman Empire-turned-Turkish Republic genocided close to a million of its Christian Greek population (around one-third of its total), mostly through forced marches or labor enslavement in deadly conditions. As Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Chancellor of Germany, an Ottoman ally, said at the time in 1917: 

The indications are that the Turks plan to eliminate the Greek element as enemies of the state, as they did earlier with the Armenians. The strategy implemented by the Turks is of displacing people to the interior without taking measures for their survival by exposing them to death, hunger, and illness. The abandoned homes are then looted and burnt or destroyed. Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks.

In response, the League of Nations began organizing population transfers to Greece (with a smaller transfer of Greek Turks and other Muslims to Turkey). After the final removals were arranged in 1927, Turkey’s non-Muslim (mostly Christian) population had dropped from 20 percent in 1906 to 2.6 percent. So large was the deportation, refugees in Greece reached 25 percent of the population, in turn affecting the electoral landscape due to the Greek diaspora being more liberal-minded than the conservative native Greeks.