Portside

1938-five years after Hitler came to power, after the beginning of the "Final Solution", Jewish refugees were denied entry into the United States. Then it was anti-Semitism and fear of European radicals and communists; today it is anti-Muslim hysteria. Then the U.S. closed its' eyes to the Holocaust; today GOP governors and congressmen are closing the borders while over 250,000 have died in Syria, there are over 3 million refugees and 6.5 million are internally displaced

Postwar U.S. authorities helped rehabilitate erstwhile collaborators with the Japanese occupation in the name of fighting communism. Generations later, it’s led to the grandson of a despised Philippine collaborator endorsing the re-militarization of his country’s former occupiers — by the grandson of a war criminal, no less.

The refugee influx struck a strong emotional chord with me, as a Hungarian-American visiting my parents' homeland. I had arrived in Hungary on August 25 with my wife Debi, to visit my late Catholic mother's relatives, and retrace the stories of my Jewish father who had survived the genocide of World War II.

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Today the U.S. government treats immigrants from Latin America the way liberated Jews were treated after World War II. Then a presidential aid reported: "we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops." Our nation of immigrants treats modern immigrants with arrest and detention; and modern immigrant (concentration) camps.