I just recently read and wrote about America for Americans. It’s a depressing description of our treatment to new immigrants going all of the way back to the 18th century.
There’s one episode in particular that absolutely made my head explode. I thought it was interesting enough to warrant its own entry. Over the years, I’ve read a bunch of history and I’d never even heard a whiff of what I’m about to discuss.
Most people know about the Japanese incarceration into internment camps during WWII. Some two thirds of the detainees were actually American citizens. It was done despite the fact that there was no evidence of any espionage. In fact, there are documents that prove that, from the beginning, there was no military value in the internment. It was done for purely racist reasons. The head of West Coast defense, General De Witt, said during congressional testimony that the fact that there is no evidence of espionage and sabotage is actually proof that it is in fact being planned. That’s some awesome logic!
The Supreme Court got a chance to weigh in on this issue with Korematsu vs United States. They whiffed on it. The majority decision basically said that even though people of Japanese descent were being specifically targeted that it was not a racial issue due to the now known to be false assumption that martial necessity required such action.
So, it stood until 1983, when Fred Korematsu was finally able to get his conviction overturned. In 2011, the US Solicitor General officially said that the government acted in error and actively suppressed evidence during the trial. In 2018, the Supreme Court, in an opinion, officially said that the Korematsu decision was made in error and disavowed it.
Since this was all started with FDR’s signed executive order, you can say that the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch all failed US citizens of Japanese ancestry.
That’s all bad, but believe it or not, it gets worse.
People of Japanese descent also settled in other countries on the American continent. For example, there was a significant contingent in Peru.
The US government perceived these people as threats as well. The US government coordinated with some dozen or so Latin and South American countries. The US government convinced these other nations to round up their citizens of Japanese ancestry and to ship them to the US.
Again, these are citizens of non-US countries. Peruvian citizens were rounded up by Peruvian security forces and were shipped up to a US internment camp in, for example, Arizona. Their lives were uprooted. They had very little time to prepare. They were just packed up and shipped over a thousand miles to stay in the US and were thrown into what were effectively prisons.
That’s really bad, but believe it or not, it gets worse.
There were Americans in Japan that found themselves trapped when the war started. The US and Japanese governments set up a civilian exchange program to repatriate their own citizens. For reasons not completely clear to me, the US did not want to send their own people of Japanese descent. Therefore, the US ended up sending some of the internees from other countries to Japan in exchange for American citizens interned in Japan.
Yes, you are reading that correctly. The US government interned Peruvian citizens that were living in the country of Peru just because they happened to have Japanese ancestry. They then took those Peruvian citizens and shipped them off to Japan, a country most had never been to, to get American citizens back.
That’s truly bad, but believe it or not, it gets worse.
At the end of WWII, the US emerges victorious and Japan is in shambles. With buildings bombed to rubble or set ablaze and its infrastructure completely destroyed, the Japanese people were basically living in holes in the ground and desperately scrambling for food.
Since the war was over, the US needed to shut down the internment camps. For the US internees, it was pretty much close the camps, force everyone out, and let them figure out where to restart their lives.
They couldn’t do the same with the non-US internees. The US couldn’t just set random Peruvians off running haphazard into our country, right? And actually going to the trouble of figuring out where each internee came from and making an effort to send them back to their own home country just seems too hard, right?
The US government decided that the right thing to do would be to take all of the non-US internees and ship them off to Japan. Yes, the Peruvian citizen that a few short years ago was happily living in Peru and probably had never even been to Japan was sent to live in a completely devastated Japan that couldn’t even house and feed its own people.
And that’s about as worse as it can be.
dorkenstein 