This week we commemorate the 70th anniversary of a shameful and dark chapter in American history. On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which provided the legal authority for the forced relocation and incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent -- the vast majority of whom were citizens.
The anniversary of this tragic national mistake provides a teachable moment for our nation on the dangers of stereotyping, prejudice, and racial profiling -- even as we face the very real, continuing threat of terrorism.
Coming just 10 weeks after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt's executive order was issued against the backdrop of widespread, baseless fears that Americans of Japanese ancestry might pose a threat to the U.S -- anxiety that was certainly fed by a long history of prejudice and xenophobia directed against Japanese Americans.
Executive Order 9066 authorized the creation of military zones for Japanese citizens and resident aliens, which paved the way for the forced expulsion of 120,000 American citizens of Japanese descent from their homes to camps throughout the western U.S. -- where they were held behind barbed wire without evidence documenting a single individual's disloyalty towards America.
Those incarcerated in the camps were uprooted from their communities, separated from their families, their homes, and their possessions, and lost their personal liberties and freedoms until the end of the war.
Tragically, the president's executive order was bolstered by additional congressional enactments. And when the constitutionality of these actions was challenged in two main cases before the U.S. Supreme Court -- Hirabayashi v. U.S., and Korematsu v. U.S. -- the court held that these clearly discriminatory actions by the government were, in fact, justified and constitutional.
Even Japanese Americans serving in the armed forces were segregated from their units -- and a predominantly Japanese American unit was formed -- the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
In April 1976, President Gerald R. Ford finally rescinded Executive Order 9066. And four years later, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to investigate the impact of the executive order and the internment camps.
That commission issued its nearly 500-page report, Personal Justice Denied, in 1983. The report concluded that, "The promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it -- detention, ending detention and ending exclusion -- were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership."
The commission also called for Congress to apologize for these injustices. That recommendation was fulfilled in 1988, when Congress approved the Civil Liberties Act, which provided a formal apology and limited reparations to the Japanese citizens and resident aliens that had been sent to internment camps.
Now, in 2012, a divisive and polarizing debate over immigration reform, as well as efforts to stereotype Muslim Americans as potential terrorists after 9/11, threaten the progress we have made in promoting respect and understanding among all Americans and the lessons we have learned from the forced internment of Japanese Americans.
Though America is, as then-Senator John F. Kennedy wrote in his famous 1958 essay, "A Nation of Immigrants," the current white-hot, political debate over the contours of immigration reform has resulted in hateful rhetoric, profiling, stereotyping, and dehumanizing language about Hispanics, Muslims, and new immigrants to America.
Make no mistake -- there is a direct connection between the tenor of this political debate and the daily lives of immigrants in our communities. Harsh enforcement-only restrictions have fostered fear, mistrust, and discrimination against immigrants and those perceived to be immigrants.
And the proliferation of anti-Sharia laws directed against Muslims are an unnecessary response to a non-existent problem in America. The xenophobic references to immigrants as criminals, as a threat to our safety, and damaging to American culture have too-frequently derailed meaningful policy debate -- and stand in the way of the kind of reforms Americans desperately seek to fix the nation's broken immigration system.
In many communities, February 19th is annually recognized as the Day of Remembrance for the Japanese American community. Jewish Americans annually commemorate the horrors of the Holocaust during the spring, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom Hashoah. Clearly, both our communities can celebrate together the distance we have come from February 1942.
But, especially at this time, all Americans have a stake in remembering -- and learning lessons -- from the past.
Abraham H. Foxman is National Director of the Anti-Defamation League. Floyd Mori is National Executive Director of the Japanese American Citizens League.
Ellen Cassedy: Remembering the Holocaust - With Steponas
AMERICANS were able to accomplish , under such distressing conditions . May we never intern our own , never .
Somebody's Mother needs to be in charge of all these childish violent men !
Grow up, sonny. Don't talk about eras iof which you know absolutely nothing, nada. I was there, and I fought in that war. I remember how it actually was.
The U.S. would have exhibited your kind of personal courage by seeking evidence before convicting and incarcerating (in pretty terrible conditions) so many people. I'll bet you expected no less of yourself than to act confidently and effectively, but with judgment. A person and a country show what they are made of at the hour of maximum danger. Courage emerges, or perhaps it does not.
Fear and danger were both high, no question, but the cost to the U.S., never mind the incalculable cost to the victims of this unnecessary and forced "migration," is actual and lasting. We will never know what was lost by putting people into camps based on their race, nor can we deny that we were soon fighting against this very thing in Europe. We are all wounded by this injustice, but not as wounded as citizens (citizens!) of Japanese heritage.
As a participant in that war, you have a view. As a serious student of history, I have another. Both are legitimate -- your experience vs. my dispassionate study. I think it best not to blame and to concentrate on the effects. But, I beg you, let us admit that it was wrong. We're big enough for that.
Again, I thank you most sincerely for your service. Without you and 11 million like you, the outcome of the whole thing would have been terrible. No argument there. Go well.
It also should be noted that the Democratic Congress codified it into law, which even deprived the victims of the right of the writ of Habeas Corpus, which law was upheld by the Supreme Court in the case of Korematsu v. United States. At the time seven Roosevelt appointees sat on the Court.
In fact three justices dissented in the Koramatsu case.
And, there was a dissenter within the Democratic ranks. Who was it?
This is going to hurt.
J. Edgar Hoover, who sent an eight page memo opposing the action to the Attorney General, informing him that the FBI had found all allegations of subversive activity on the part of the Japanese Americans to be baseless.
So lets have no more hypocrisy about the liberal Democrats as the guardian of individual liberties.
As a result of a lack of a common national identity, whatever politically alligned group is in the majority gets to write the rules. Obviously during WWII that group were the WASPs. If we had not opened out borders early and often from our founding until recently we would not have had people from wildly divergent cultures and ethnicities becoming citizens, and the WASPs would have had no one to interr.
It is a simple fact people of similar cultures and values flock together. This is human nature and cannot be avoided. We assimilated well so long as those being melted in the pot were from Northwestern Europe. Over the last 30 years the number of Northwestern European immigrants has dwindled to a pittance, and most of our immigrants are from places which were not represented in our population as of 1850. The exception is Black Americans, who, although they have been here since our founding are racially outside the mainstream culture, have been sidelined for generations. This is not a value judgment. It is an important statistic.
When you understand like attracts like, and in America our divisions are more noteworthy than our similarities, the possibility of an all-out exclusion of one group of Americans by another is pretty much guaranteed. It also goes a long way to explain popular sentiment in favor of internment in 1942 and the distrust of the Muslim community today.
This is not something we can change by legislation.
The answer to that question will probably be 180 degrees different depending on your political philosophy, and therein lies the problem. The US was a "great experiment." If you believed in the American Ideal--generally accepted to be the life of an average American as described by Alexis deTocqueville back in 1831--you were an American no matter where your parents came from.
Now even umpteenth generation Americans can't agree on an American ideal. We don't have an ethnic identity. We don't have a racial identity. We don't have a religious identity, and we darned well don't have a unifying political identity.
Our personal core values define our political ideology and they are all over the map. We have been self-sorting ourselves into culturally homogeneous communities for the last 30 years thus insuring safe Congressional seats and no motivation for compromise. What we have become in my lifetime is the Divided States of America.
My theory for this is because we had no identity except a moral and political one, and that is not enough to maintain a national identity. Ask yourself why Japan is so homogeneous, or Germany, or Switzerland, or Saudi Arabia. They have a common culture, religion and ethnicity which allows them to move forward more or less in unison. The Old World will survive. The new one, not so much.
de Toqueville traveled mostly in New England, and has chapter upon chapter about democracy as practiced in small town Vermont and Massachusetts. Very little is said about the agricultural south, with its entrenched system of slavery, or of the eastern and English slave merchants who made it possible. Even in the north abolitionists were a tiny minority, with most people agreeable to the practice of enslaving other human beings. Not to mention the persecution, even extermination, of the native Americans. This was part of our British heritage, which held us together as a cohesive nation because the WASPs have always been good at practicing discrimination.
We were not a unified nation at our founding and have been moving slowly apart every since. An internment of a specific group in times of national emergency would be totally impossible today simply because we are so different. You might get one block of legislators to go along with it, but Liberals would never let it happen.
Unfortunately the response to said emergency would probably be geographically homogeneous for those for or against internment. The group labeled as "the enemy" would be used as a wedge issue further dividing conservatives and liberals.
How divided can we get before something snaps and we call a Constitutional Convention?