Japanese American internment: U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, providing $20,000 payments to Japanese Americans who were either interned in or relocated by the United States during World War II.
The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (Pub.L. 100383, title I, August 10, 1988, 102 Stat. 904, 50a U.S.C. § 1989b et seq.) is a United States federal law that granted reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned by the United States government during World War II. The act was sponsored by California Democratic congressman and former internee Norman Mineta, Wyoming Republican senator Alan K. Simpson (who had met Mineta while visiting an internment camp) and California senator Pete Wilson. The bill was supported by the majority of Democrats in Congress, while the majority of Republicans voted against it. The act was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.
The act granted each surviving internee $20,000 in compensation, equivalent to $39,000 in 2020, with payments beginning in 1990. The legislation stated that government actions had been based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership" as opposed to legitimate security reasons. A total of 82,219 received redress checks.Because the law was restricted to American citizens and legal permanent residents, ethnic Japanese who had been taken from their homes in Latin America (mostly from Peru) were not granted reparations, regardless of whether they had remained in the United States, had returned to Latin America or had been deported to Japan after the war. In 1996, Carmen Mochizuki filed a class-action lawsuit and won a settlement of approximately $5,000 per eligible person. Of those affected, 145 received their settlement before funds were exhausted. In 1999, funds were approved for the Attorney General to pay compensation to the remaining claimants.
In the United States during World War II, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom lived on the Pacific Coast, were forcibly relocated and incarcerated in concentration camps in the western interior of the country. Approximately two-thirds of the internees were United States citizens. These actions were issued by president Franklin D. Roosevelt via executive order shortly after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.Of the 127,000 Japanese Americans who were living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei (literal translation: 'second generation'; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei ('third generation', the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei ('first generation') immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship under U.S. law.Japanese Americans were placed in concentration camps based on local population concentrations and regional politics. More than 112,000 Japanese Americans who were living on the West Coast were interned in camps which were located in its interior. However, in Hawaii (which was under martial law), where 150,000-plus Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the territory's population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were also interned. The internment is considered to have been a manifestation of racism – though it was implemented with intent to mitigate a security risk which Japanese Americans were believed to pose, the scale of the internment in proportion to the size of the Japanese American population far surpassed similar measures which were undertaken against German and Italian Americans, who were mostly non-citizens. California defined anyone with 1⁄16th or more Japanese lineage as a person who should be interned. Colonel Karl Bendetsen, the architect of the program, went so far as to say that anyone with "one drop of Japanese blood" qualified.Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066, issued two months after Pearl Harbor, which allowed regional military commanders to designate "military areas" from which "any or all persons may be excluded." Although the executive order did not mention Japanese Americans, this authority was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were required to leave Alaska and the military exclusion zones from all of California and parts of Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, with the exception of those internees who were being held in government camps. The internees were not only people of Japanese ancestry, they also included a relatively small number—though still totalling well over ten thousand—of people of German and Italian ancestry as well as Germans who were expelled from Latin America and deported to the U.S.: 124 Approximately 5,000 Japanese Americans relocated outside the exclusion zone before March 1942, while some 5,500 community leaders had been arrested immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack and thus were already in custody.The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing specific individual census data on Japanese Americans. The Bureau denied its role for decades despite scholarly evidence to the contrary, and its role became more widely acknowledged by 2007. In its 1944 decision Korematsu v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the removals under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court limited its decision to the validity of the exclusion orders, avoiding the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens without due process, but ruled on the same day in Ex parte Endo that a loyal citizen could not be detained, which began their release. The day before the Korematsu and Endo rulings were made public, the exclusion orders were rescinded.In the 1980s, under mounting pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and redress organizations, President Jimmy Carter opened an investigation to determine whether the decision to put Japanese Americans into concentration camps had been justified by the government. He appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to investigate the camps. In 1983, the Commission's report, Personal Justice Denied, found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty at the time and concluded that the incarceration had been the product of racism. It recommended that the government pay reparations to the internees. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which officially apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 (equivalent to $44,000 in 2020) to each former internee who was still alive when the act was passed. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." By 1992, the U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion (equivalent to $3.5 billion in 2020) in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned.