Japanese American Relocation

             On December 7, 1941, the Japanese made a surprise attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. (Fremon 6) Right after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war against Japan. (Fremon 7) On February 19, 1942, as the U.S. fought the war they decided to issue Executive Order 9066. This order gave the military authority to exclude "any or all Japanese-Americas from designated area, including the California coast." (Fremon 31) Racist attacks on the Japanese-Americans began escalating and the hated Japanese-Americans were hurriedly moved to the relocation camps the American government had prepared for them. Was this decision made by the American government justifiable?
             The action to intern all Japanese-Americans was morally and legally wrong. On one hand, it could be argued that the U.S. government's decision to place Japanese- Americans in relocation camps was justifiable given the atmosphere of public "hysteria". The "sneak" attack on Pearl Harbor was a cruel one and the vast majority of the American public was angry. In addition, there was a possibility that there were spies and traitors who were working for Japan among the Japanese-Americans living in the U.S. Despite all these factors that might make the internment of the Japanese-Americans justifiable, I can argue against this idea. The action of actually evicting and moving the Japanese-Americans was a morally and constitutionally wrong decision made by the United States because it "inevitably raised extremely grave questions as to the consistency of such a program with the requirements and prohibitions of the federal constitution. The fact that two-thirds of the evacuees were citizens of the United States by birth sharpened these very grave issues." (War Relocation Authority) I would like to illustrate in this report that treating citizens of the United States as not loyal based on their ethnicity alone was wrong.
             Before the Japa...

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Japanese American Relocation. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 16:16, April 25, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/15215.html