Japanese American internment

Japanese American Internment
Student’s Name
Institution affiliations
The Japanese migrated from their homeland due to political and economic forces, the economic opportunity, and industrial development which existed in the US. Japanese American internment took place during the World War II when there were fears of national security in the US. The American citizens, as well as the government, wondered if the Japanese loyalty lied on Japan or the US. Besides this, the Japanese Americans were a target of racial prejudice over a decade, and hence more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in the US were rounded up by the heavy military guard and sent to camps fenced with barbed wire. They were imprisoned in the camps for three years (1942-1943) until the US government ensured that Japan was no longer a threat (Heinrichs, 2011). The imprisonment was as a result of wartime proclamation from President Franklin D Roosevelt that was made shortly after the Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan in December 1941 (Ng, 2010).

The Supreme Court in 1944 found that the issue on appeal of defying an exclusion order by Korematsu was constitutional. Though the court did not rule on matters such as incarceration it made a decision on exclusion orders and their legitimacy. The Japanese Americans, in 1980 put pressure on the then-president Jimmy Carter to give a solution on whether the steps to close the Japanese Americans in an int…