The Internment of Japanese Americans

Japanese Internment
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequent declaration of war by the US against Japan set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the internment of Japanese-origin people living in the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote Executive Order 9066, ordering all Japanese-Americans to evacuate the West Coast two months after the bombing. The result was that 120,000 people were interned in 10 camps across the country (History.com, 2017). The order was driven by the widespread belief that Japanese-Americans and immigrants were plotting to aid Japan in the conflict. There was no evidence of such a plot, or of any sentiment to sabotage the war effort. The relocation and internment was not applied to people of Japanese origin living in Hawai'I, nor to people of German or Italian origin, nations that the US was also fighting in the conflict (History.com, 2017).
One of the benefactors of the internment were farmers and fishers of non-Japanese descent. Indeed, many farmers were involved in efforts to lobby for the relocation of Japanese. The removal of so many Japanese-Americans reduced competition for the remaining farmers, fishers and laborers, giving them an economic advantage. In many cases, there were property losses associated with the relocation, as farms, businesses and other property were typically confiscated from the Japanese-Americans, or simply taken after the people were removed. So there were many people who became economic beneficiaries of the policy.
The order also set back the Japanese-Americans in several ways. First, they lost their property. In 1948, a law was passed allowing for some reimbursement for property losses, but this was insufficient to account for the economic disruption, nor was it enough to restore the Japanese-Americans to their prior socio-economic position. In addition, there was disruption to the Japanese-American society that further created issues for economic reintegration. Meanwhile, those who seized Japanese-American property were allowed to continue use of these assets. They had already seen economic gain from their use during the war, but continued use after the war put those people on a much stronger footing, directly at the expense of the internees. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 provided limited reimbursement, $70,000 for each surviving person who was interned, but that was nowhere near sufficient to account for property lost, plus loss of economic opportunity that came with the internment, the loss of property and the removal from American economic life for several years, including after the internment ended.
Socially, this reintegration proved a challenge, because the internment had created significant mutual mistrust. There was a sense of loss and betrayal within the Japanese-American community that would prove a substantial challenge for economic and social reintegration – the effects of the internment would extend well beyond the time period of the internment (Frail, 2017), and would put Japanese-Americans behind where they should have been economically for at least a generation or two.
The social institutions that allowed for the internment have changed only somewhat. The echoes of Japanese internment live on in the White House today with calls for border walls and the wholesale crimininalization of specific ethnic, religious and national groups. The efforts at repairing the damage were too little and far too late – the recipients of financial restitution for internment being elderly by the time that money arrived, and it was a token amount of money. No actions were taken in part because there was a sense that normalcy can be thrown out the window in wartime. Further, restitution for all aggrieved groups is a political hot button issue, and there is little willpower among politicians to go down that road. What could have been done would have been to restore properties to their original Japanese-American owners with compensation – if the government realized the internment was wrong, it should have done everything in its power to remedy the situation as quickly as possible, so that the impacts would not extend for generations. The approach used was basically a cop-out, and did nothing to account for the damages suffered by the people affected.
References

Frail. T. (2017). The injustice of Japanese-American internment camps resonates strongly to this day. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved October 15, 2017 from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/injustice-japanese-americans-internment-camps-resonates-strongly-180961422/

History.com (2017) Japanese-American relocation History.com. Retrieved October 15, 2017 from http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/japanese-american-relocation#