Trump says mass deportations will ease the housing crisis. We’ve seen that before — under the Nazis in France
A cornerstone of Trump’s campaign evokes an astonishingly grim piece of history
Attendees at the 2024 Republican National Convention hold signs reading “Mass Deportation Now!” Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Imagine a place with a housing shortage where, under a new government, tens of thousands of homes are emptied of people overnight. The previous tenants have fled, or have been rounded up in camps by armed government agents, with no right to contest expulsion. People with connections jockey for the best apartments. Neighbors alert to the pre-dawn banging down the hall can tip off their friends that a nice two-bedroom will be available soon.
That is how mass deportation plays out as housing policy. It is the plan that Donald Trump and the Republican party are championing. And it is exactly what unfolded in Paris between 1940 and 1944, as the Vichy regime redistributed vacated “Jewish apartments” to non-Jews. To Sarah Gensburger, a French social scientist who has spent a decade with two colleagues researching the archives for a forthcoming book, the parallels between the declared MAGA plan and that fascist past are shocking and surreal.
During the Nazi occupation, the archives show, successive round-ups by the French police were treated as a solution to a major housing crisis. In today’s campaign for president, Donald Trump promises mass round-ups and deportation camps as the answer to a shortage of affordable housing. “The similarities are horrifying,” Gensburger said. “It creates a special kind of market for all the worst impulses of mankind.”
In France, it took a humiliating military defeat by the Germans in 1940 for the populace to turn to a fascistic strongman who promised to cleanse the nation of its foreign “parasites.” The government of Marechal Philippe Petain ordered the internment of any foreigner “in excess in the French economy,” and all individuals “dangerous to national defense or public security” — the same approach as Trump’s plan for deportation camps for economically unwanted immigrants and his vow to go after “the enemy within.” 15,000 people had their citizenship revoked. Those affected were predominantly Jewish; later laws specifically targeted Jews.
Hitler ordered the systematic plunder of everything left in the apartments of Jews who had been deported, arrested, or had fled, though most were poor immigrants from Eastern Europe, not art collectors. In Paris alone, 38,000 apartments were stripped bare. What happened next to the emptied apartments has remained unexamined for decades, Gensburger said.
But with a database of 9,000 cases, she and her co-authors, the historians Isabelle Backouche and Eric Le Bourhis, have documented how Parisian society seized on the apartments as a housing windfall. Their book, Appartements témoins: La spoliation des locataires juifs à Paris sous l’Occupation, 1940-1946, is to be published in January by La Decouverte.
A new municipal bureaucracy reallocated the apartments to non-Jews. Some went to toadies of the regime. Half went to bombing victims. And many went to neighbors who quickly applied for a modest “Jewish apartment” they knew, because it was a little larger or better lit than theirs.
In today’s America, the market, not a government bureaucracy, would handle the fallout from mass roundups. Private equity, already buying up homes to turn into high-priced rentals, would surely profit from bank foreclosures on vacated immigrant housing, including homes bought by undocumented workers with mortgages that Trump has vowed to outlaw. And what kind of fee do you suppose realtors could claim for the inside scoop on the next Brooklyn raid?
Trump supporters may say that they only meant to target illegal immigrants when waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at the Republican National Convention. But in a broken immigration system driven by executive directives and viral propaganda, raids can hinge not only on racial profiling, but on political vendetta. Awaiting those arrested is a shadowy immigration detention network where virtually no due process safeguards apply.
Trump and his allies have vowed to strip legal status from those deemed unworthy, starting with Haitian refugees. Trump’s party plans to end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents. Echoing Nazi language, Trump has dehumanized immigrants of color as “animals,” “poisoning the blood of the nation,” and he consistently invokes violence against political opponents.
That is the context for the Republican claim that mass deportation will increase the housing supply — despite economists’ skepticism — yet a routine media reaction has failed to reckon with the house-by-house dispossession at stake.
When I was an immigration reporter for The New York Times, I covered an upsurge in pre-dawn raids of homes by armed agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2006 and 2007. The raids were billed as hunts for dangerous immigrant fugitives and gang members — people like the “criminal aliens” showcased in videos at Trump rallies these days. Instead, it turned out, teams of agents faced with new arrest quotas were indiscriminately barging into the homes of Latino families, rousting U.S. citizens and legal residents from bed at gunpoint, and seizing anyone who did not produce proof of legal status.
I keep thinking of Rachel Ségal-Jaeglé, a French Holocaust survivor who persuaded elementary schools in Paris to belatedly memorialize neighborhood children deported to their deaths. When I interviewed her in 2011, Jaeglé was protesting the expulsion of undocumented immigrant families who had children in the same schools. Making the connection was controversial, she told me, but she owed her life to a few people who had chosen resistance.
“There are no extermination camps, so it’s not the same,” she said. “But my question is, do we have to wait to get to that point to react? In hard times, we always seek scapegoats. The hard times are never the same and the scapegoats may change. But one can perceive what’s unjust and inhuman.”
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