Why were Japanese Americans forced to move, while German Americans and Italian Americans did not generally suffer the same consequences?
Upvote:3
Wikipedia (for what it is worth) has articles on Internment of Americans of both Japanese and German heritage.
From these, it emerges that out of “nearly 130,000 mainland Japanese Americans” some 110,000 to 120,000 were “forcibly relocated”. In other words: virtually all of them.
On the other hand, out of 1.2 million persons born in Germany and 5 million persons with two native-German parents, a mere 11,000 were detained.
These figures speak for themselves. You asked “why”. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the US authorities were not motivated by military considerations, but by pure racism.
Upvote:8
Why were majority of Japanese-Americans forced to move? Why didn't the German-Americans share the same fate?
About 13,000 German nationals, Italian nationals, German-Americans, and Italian-Americans were interned under Executive Order 9066. This number however represented a tiny, tiny fraction of the tens of millions of such peoples in the US at that time, and most of those detained Europeans were foreign nationals.
This pales in comparison to the internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans during World War II. The US interned 110,000 to 120,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans, almost all on the mainland. This represented about 80 to 90% of the Japanese population on the mainland. To make matters worse, while native-born Germans and Italians could receive citizenship, native-born Japanese could not. (This would remain the case until 1952, when the Supreme Court ruled the various alien land laws to be unconstitutional.) To make matters even worse, almost all native-born Japanese had been in the US for 20 years or more.
The only explanation for this is "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." This was the conclusion of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which was established by Congress in 1980 to investigate World War II internment by the US and which issued its final report entitled "Personal Justice Denied" in 1982, forty years after the internment began.
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