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When I went into the Rohingya camps in Myanmar in 2015, I also talked to people in town who were happy their former neighbors were in camps. Insisting they weren't racist or bigots, many said all they really wanted was for the government to deport the Rohingya to another country.
They claimed the Rohingya were illegal immigrants, rapists, and terrorists. If I mentioned a Rohingya they actually knew, they would sometimes acknowledge maybe *that* Rohingya person wasn't a criminal. They often argued that the Rohingya should be deported as a group anyway.
It was heartbreaking. I was there just after Trump had declared his candidacy in the US, and it was the same rhetoric, almost word for word. A little over a year later in Myanmar, the military drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya over the border amid terrible atrocities.
I think people today tend to reach first for the Nazi example because with the Final Solution, Germany entered another universe and descended all the way into the abyss. So it's the camps story that is foremost in people's mind and is told most often--as it should be.
And no two moments in history are ever the same. But camps, sweeps and roundups, deportations and demonization of minority cultures--these things have happened over and over. They never end well. It's only a question of how far a nation will descend before it stops or is stopped.
