The lives of Japanese-Americans were turned upside down after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
On Feb. 19, 1942, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. About 120,000 out of 127,000 Japanese-Americans living in the continental U.S. were put in ten internment camps (euphemism for concentration camps) by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). These camps were located in Arizona, California, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and Arkansas.
Roughly two-thirds were American citizens, having been born in this country and qualifying as such under the 14th Amendment. Those individuals included second generation Japanese and their children. The rest were Japanese immigrants born in Japan and who were ineligible for citizenship. Another 150,000 Japanese-Americans lived in Hawaii where they were one-third of the population. Only 1200 to 1800 were incarcerated because there were too many of them to imprison.
Japanese-Americans were viewed as security risks along the west coast, although of the German and Italian-Americans, numbering in the millions, only thousands were interned. Most of those imprisoned Germans and Italians were non-citizens.
Many of the Japanese-Americans lived in the Puget Sound region. Some ran truck farms in and around Sumner and Puyallup. Others lived and worked in the lumber industry above Enumclaw.
The soon-to-be interned Japanese-Americans were forced to sell their property and their businesses. Often, caring neighbors managed their property while they were incarcerated. Some Japanese-Americans were taken advantage of by greedy individuals who saw a chance to get a bargain. As they left their homes, they were able to take only what they could carry.
In the camps, Japanese-Americans lived in overcrowded tar paper-covered barracks. Barbed wire and armed guards kept them inside the camps.
In the 1944 Korematsu v. United States Supreme Court decision, the court upheld the validity of the internment based upon Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, ignoring the 14th Amendment’s wording that no person (not citizen), could be deprived of his/her life, liberty, or property without due process of the law. On Dec. 14, 1944, the executive order was rescinded. Nine of the ten camps were shut down by the end of 1945, after the war.
In 1983, a commission created by President Jimmy Carter found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty and concluded that internment had been the product of racism. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan officially apologized with the Civil Liberties Act if 1988, which admitted the government’s actions were based on race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. The government awarded each survivor the 2023 equivalent of $52,000.
It seems that we are living in a similar era today, but instead of Japanese-Americans being the target of racism, it’s immigrants, both illegal, and American citizens (children) who are now the focus of a recent executive order.
According to a Jan. 23rd editorial in the Morning News Tribune titled: “Federal Workers May Soon Face Moral Dilemmas. Here’s What They Can Learn from History” by Eric Miller, Homeland Security employees may face problems carrying out the recent detention and deportation required by presidential executive order.
Miller writes, “There is a space between resigning your job and where awareness of injustice remains acute; where ethical choices, however small, still exist; and where individual acts of conscience, even within an unjust system, can make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.”
In the next few weeks and months, we may witness a repeat of history harkening back to World War II when the United States was attacked by the Japanese military. The current president is declaring that the United States is being “invaded from across our southern border”. The use of the word “invasion” here does not compare with what happened on Dec. 7, 1941.
Mark Twain’s famous quote applies in this modern case: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Executive orders have caused the world to be turned upside down. How the current administration and Americans handle the current executive order in regard to immigration will tell us whether we have matured, or whether we are no better off than we were after another president issued Executive Order 9066.
Richard Elfers is a columnist, a former Enumclaw City Council member and a Green River College professor.