Concentration Camp Labor Cannot Become Normal -- Timothy Snyder
https://snyder.substack.com/p/concentration-camp-laborConcentration camps are sites of tempting slave labor. Among many other aims, the Soviets used concentration camp labor to build canals and work mines. The Nazi German concentration camp system followed a capitalist version of the same logic: it drew in businesses with the prospect of inexpensive labor.
We know this and have no excuse not to act.
What happens next in the U.S.? Workers who are presented as "undocumented" will be taken to the camps. Perhaps they will work in the camps themselves, as slaves to government projects. But more likely they will be offered to American companies on special terms: a one-time payment to the government, for example, with no need for wages or benefits. In the simplest version, and perhaps the most likely, detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working. Their stay in the concentration camp will be presented as a purge or a legalization for which companies should be grateful. Trump has already said that this is the idea, calling it "owner responsibility."
We should remember what drew I.G Farben into Auschwitz: profit. But there are of course precedents for extreme exploitation in American history, including but not limited to the history of chattel slavery. And slavery is not entirely illegal in the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment allows slavery if only as punishment for a crime. The people described as "undocumented" or "denaturalized" (and other categories sure to be invented soon) are portrayed as criminals.
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since I read the Gulag Archipelago. Awful.
One difference back then was that it took place under the umbrella of well-established totalitarianism where everybody was, as you point out, under the thumb of the government. I've heard that there was also a lot of snitching in the USSR.
Another factor IMO is that I believe the Gulags were often out in Siberia. Even if a person could escape the Gulag, where could they go in a country almost twice the size of the next largest country? And how would they get anywhere? And how many other countries spoke Russian? All that would seem to severely limit one's options even without heavy enforcement.
Many of the immigrants in the U.S., on the other hand, obviously have experience with migrating across borders and evading capture. Thus the need for more troops to keep them in place.
