Treatment of Japanese Americans and Italian American in WWII

Two centuries ago, the framers of the Constitution wrestled with the fundamental problem of government: how to balance the rights of individual citizens and minority groups against the need for order and defense of the society itself. One of the most obvious failures of this democratic system to proved equal rights for all of its citizens is evidence by the internment of Japanese-Americans and Italian Americans in detention camps during the period of WWII. Despite good intentions brought about by war fear, this imprisonment cannot be justified due to its impact on our American ideal of racial equality, the guarantee of civil rights to all citizens and the governments’ requirement to apply federal tax money only in beneficial ways.

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, whi

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The exact figures are not available but it is easy to see that millions of dollars were spent to house and care for these people. We have discovered that racial profiling has almost no effect on preventing crime or undesirable actions. Not only were the rights of the detainees violated, but the principals of our American democracy were violated in a way that should offend all American citizens. ch forced all Japanese-American and many Italian-Americans, regardless of loyalty or citizenship, to evacuate the West Coast.

Many of the detainees were forced to sell their property at an extremely low cost, or simply have it taken away. Italian-Americans were forced to leave Pittsburgh after being branded a security risk. This expense did not end with the release of the detainees, but continued to grow. No comparable order applied to Hawaii, one third of whose population was Japanese-American. How can a country that clams to be a democracy justify destroying the rights of thousands of its own citizens when there is no evidence of any threat or danger?

The third point to be considered here is the billions of dollars spent by the federal government. This expense can in no way be justified when these people posed no real threat to the security of the United States. Thousands of fishermen were forced to give up their boats.

It would be impossible for any person or government agency to give reasonable justification for what was done. In 1948 many of the former detainees received reimbursement for property lost, and in 1988, “Congress awarded restitution payments of twenty thousand dollars to each survivor of the camps, it is estimated that about 73,000 persons will eventually receive this compensation for the violation of their liberties” (Funer). If this could happen to them then it could also happen to anyone else, and the basis of our constitutional system has always been to prevent this type of action by providing equal rights and liberty to everyone.

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