HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF by Florence Fields
In the spring of 1942, I and more than 120,000 other Japanese Americans were taken from our homes on the U.S. West Coast by armed U.S. soldiers and locked up in internment camps located in desert-like locations in the interior of the country.
We (Japanese Americans) had committed no crime. But no due process was available to determine our individual innocence or guilt. Our only (predetermined) crime, it turned out, was our shared ancestry – Japanese – although a significant majority of us were American citizens, born in the United States. Should ancestry be considered a crime?
In February, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which in effect authorized the U.S. Army to remove and intern Japanese Americans from areas along the West Coast deemed to be vulnerable to sabotage. Although there had been no evidence of sabotage, two justifications were given by U.S. officials for the internment: (1) national security; and (2) the “racial characteristics” of Japanese Americans which predisposed them to acts of espionage and sabotage.
No such acts by Japanese Americans were ever discovered. Despite lack of evidence, General John DeWitt, who commanded the Western Defense Command of the U.S. Army and was a great supporter of the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, became (in)famous for his statement that “a Jap is always a Jap whether U.S.
citizen or not.”
The federal judiciary at all levels, including the Supreme Court, finally concluded after many years that the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was primarily the result of racial bias – a culmination of decades of racial fear and hatred of Asian Americans in the U.S.
What does history teach us? Very little, it seems. Today, thousands of undocumented immigrants, many of them refugees seeking asylum, are detained and deported, usually without legal representation or hearing. In FY 2018, the U.S. government reported that 396,448 people had been detained, with a daily count of 42,188 people, while over 12,000 children were housed in a program run by the Unaccompanied Alien Children, a government agency.
Many detention centers are privately run for profit by corporations, where there is little oversight and their revenue depends on the number of “prisoners” they detain (with predictable consequences). Reports of horrible conditions and lack of needed services, including medical care, have been issued by Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and in investigative news articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post, among many other human rights organizations and media.
Just as in the case of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants without regulatory or legal recourse are unacceptable in both humanitarian and legal terms. That such an occurrence happened once in this country is shameful; that it is repeating itself again is almost unbelievable. Certainly, it is intolerable.
The United States at one time was regarded as a beacon of human rights. Actions like the internment and the current detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants, including families and unaccompanied children, which are sanctioned and supported (even mandated in some cases) by the U.S. government, need a thorough review and reassessment. Congress faces many challenges in the coming months but reform of the inhumane and lawless chaos resulting from an incoherent and ineffective immigration procedures, laws and regulations deserves priority consideration.
Will history repeat its shameful past? Or can we do better? Fortunately, it’s up to us.