He is right that: “They weren’t all Japanese-Americans.” Prof. Chiura Obata and his wife Haruko, for example, was not U.S. citizens even though they had lived in the U.S. for close to forty years before the War. Their children were U.S. citizens because they were born in the U.S. And Prof. Obata and wife desired to be U.S. citizens. But they were precluded from becoming U.S. citizens by both racist laws (like the California Alien Land Law) and poorly reasoned Supreme Court decisions (like Ozawa v. U.S.) that were not fixed until after WWII. Still, the internment encompassed not just folks like Prof. Obata who were wrongly denied citizenship, but also folks like his children who clearly were citizens.

Wes is wholly wrong when he states: “They weren’t interned. They were evacuated. … And they weren’t ‘forced to abandon their houses and businesses’ — they went voluntarily, and they came back to re-start their businesses.”

Public Proclamation No. 4, issued pursuant to Executive Order 9066, forbid American citizens of Japanese ancestry from voluntarily evacuating, and they were instead required to report to “concentration camps” (FDR’s own term) from which they were not allowed to leave and within which they were under armed guard. Their houses and property were seized by the government. They were only allowed what they could carry on their backs. They were not able to “go back” to the houses and businesses they had prior to being interred. Prof. Obata, for example, ended having to live in a fellow Professor’s attic for years after the war.

I hate to see folks like Wes attempt to defend the internment by distorting the true history. The reality is that the internment was a great social injustice, one that stemmed from clearly racist attitudes on the West Coast. The right attitude is to make sure that such an injustice is not repeated.

There were first generation Japanese sent to camps, and their children, born in the U.S. who were U.S. citizens.

I disagree that these people were evacuated. They were sent to live in jail-like compounds with guards, barracks, and barbed wire.

It is you, I suggest, who needs to do some more investigating.

They weren’t all Japanese-Americans. There were first-generation Japanese, and they were enemy aliens due to their country attacking ours. If they were Americans, than so is every single person living in the US now regardless of citizenship.

They weren’t interned. They were evacuated.

And they weren’t “forced to abandon their houses and businesses” — they went voluntarily, and they came back to re-start their businesses. How many of them could and could not? You need that data there to be honest.

If you think I am wrong, do some homework. A good place to start is here:
http://home.comcast.net/~eo9066/Contents.html

You need to really think hard about what should have been done with residents in the US who suddenly became enemy aliens. And picture yourself living in Japan at the outbreak of WWII. What would have happened to you?