Japanese Internment
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequent declaration of war by the US against Japan set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the internment of Japanese-origin people living in the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote Executive Order 9066, ordering all Japanese-Americans to evacuate the West Coast two months after the bombing. The result was that 120,000 people were interned in 10 camps across the country (History.com, 2017). The order was driven by the widespread belief that Japanese-Americans and immigrants were plotting to aid Japan in the conflict. There was no evidence of such a plot, or of any sentiment to sabotage the war effort. The relocation and internment was not applied to people of Japanese origin living in Hawai'I, nor to people of German or Italian origin, nations that the US was also fighting in the conflict (History.com, 2017).
One of the benefactors of the internment were farmers and fishers of non-Japanese descent. Indeed, many farmers were involved in efforts to lobby for the relocation of Japanese. The removal of so many Japanese-Americans reduced competition for the remaining farmers, fishers and laborers, giving them an economic advantage. In many cases, there were property losses associated...
So there were many people who became economic beneficiaries of the policy.
The order also set back the Japanese-Americans in several ways. First, they lost their property. In 1948, a law was passed allowing for some reimbursement for property losses, but this was insufficient to account for the economic disruption, nor was it enough to restore the Japanese-Americans to their prior socio-economic position. In addition, there was disruption to the Japanese-American society that further created issues for economic reintegration. Meanwhile, those who seized Japanese-American property were allowed to continue use of these assets. They had already seen economic gain from their use during the war, but continued use after the war put those people on a much stronger footing, directly at the expense of the internees. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 provided limited reimbursement, $70,000 for each surviving person who was interned, but that was nowhere near sufficient to account for property lost, plus loss of economic opportunity that came with the internment, the loss of property and the removal from American…
