Letters to the Editor: The Central American refugee crisis doesn’t come close to the Holocaust

To the editor: I’m not a fan of President Trump or the current Republican Party, but to compare this administration’s efforts to control immigration to the failure of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to come to the aid of Jews seeking to flee Europe before World War II, is to take a trip down the imaginary yellow brick road. (“FDR only allowed 1,000 refugees to escape Hitler’s Germany. My ‘family’ was among them,” Opinion, Aug. 16)

Never does op-ed article writer David Michael mention in his piece on the nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees of Oswego, N.Y., that 6 million Jews were slaughtered while FDR, the State Department, the military and much of the American press knew about the Holocaust and yet turned their backs on it.

How dare he compare the current situation of Central American refugees coming into this country, many of them illegally, to the Holocaust. I’m glad he had a warm and toasty relationship with many of these refugees, but the fact remains that America, the land of immigrants from its beginning, turned its anti-Semitic back to the horror of mass killings during World War II.

Some 80 years later, nothing has come close to that incredible crime against humanity. Nothing.

David Novis, Santa Barbara