Tim:

Such a hysterical response. As a child of Holocaust survivors myself, I think the comparison to a concentration camp is silly and a reflection of America’s lack of experience dealing with refugees (and our current justified psychosis with this administration). Some thoughts:

1. We don’t need to reinvent refugee management strategies. UNHCR has developed protocols forged in decades of dealing with refugees. At the core of these recommendations is the production of high-volume, low-cost, sanitary, temporary housing. What kind of person wouldn’t want to do the most humane, least expensive, best tested approach for dealing with this problem?
2. No one will be forced into a camp. But no one should be allowed to sleep on the streets. So if you prefer not to go to the camp, but want to sleep on the street, you will end up in jail.
3. I do not support this vagrancy-jail pipeline TODAY because there are no alternatives. Today, if you are arrested/moved for living on the street, you simply have to pack up and go somewhere else. That’s not humane or right. But once there is somewhere for you to go, you cannot continue to allow people to live on the streets.
4. The reason we need to prevent people from sleeping on the street is that it poses a significant public health problem for them and everyone else. That includes finding food, shelter, toilets, showers, medicine, sun protection, STI/pregnancy prevention, etc. We don’t allow people to live on the streets because of hard-fought lessons WRT sanitation discovered in the Pasteur era. There is overwhelming public health evidence to suggest it is deleterious, and it must stop.
5. We generally recognize that municipalities can legislate “quality of life” restrictions that restrict some freedoms in order to ensure peaceable use of private spaces. For example, if someone is playing loud music at 4am, parks a car on the street for 4 weeks, allows their dog to defecate on the sidewalk, etc — we agree that this person should be subject to rule compliance. Your “rights to do whatever you want” are not unlimited. Similarly, people camping on the streets is fundamentally an inhumane nuisance, and should not be allowed.