A cornerstone of Trump’s campaign evokes an astonishingly grim piece of history. 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.”
via forward: Trump says mass deportations will ease the housing crisis. We’ve seen that before — under the Nazis in France