Immigration by Carl J. Bon Tempo

Author:Carl J. Bon Tempo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Iseri family shut their pharmacy in advance of their forced evacuation from Los Angeles, 1942. National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

Life in the camps was incredibly difficult on multiple fronts, as the story of Aiko Yoshinaga illustrates. A teenager graduating from high school in California, Aiko eloped with her boyfriend for fear they would be split up during the incarceration. The government shipped her and her new husband to a camp near Death Valley, California, while the Yoshinaga family ended up in Arkansas. Aiko described the conditions: “The only thing that was in the ‘apartments’ when we got there were army metal beds with the springs on it, and a potbellied stove in the middle of the room. . . . No chest of drawers, no nothing, no curtains on the windows. It was the barest of the bare.”39 After Aiko gave birth to a child, she learned her father was ill, so she traveled with the baby to Arkansas. Her father met his granddaughter as he was being taken to a hospital, where he died shortly thereafter. The incarcerated showed incredible resiliency throughout the ordeal, starting camp baseball teams, planting garden plots, organizing camp governance structures, publishing newspapers, and making stunning arts and crafts out of found materials. Even so, all the incarcerated paid emotional, mental, and financial costs for decades to come.

The Supreme Court approved these actions in a series of landmark cases, most notably in Korematsu v. United States (1944). Though the Court warned against detaining whole groups on the basis of their race or ethnicity, it then cited overriding national security concerns to justify FDR’s actions. The public offered significant support for these policies, especially on the West Coast, where anti-Japanese sentiment had long roots. West Coast residents bought up Japanese-owned land, businesses, and belongings for pennies on the dollar. As one dairy farmer of Japanese descent remarked looking back: “Closed everything at a loss . . . which we never recovered from.”40 Many saw incarceration as necessary because, in the words of General John DeWitt, a leading advocate for the policy: “A Jap’s a Jap . . . it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not. . . . I don’t want any of them.”41

The End of Chinese Exclusion

If the United States proved unwelcoming to those of Japanese background, the Chinese found a different experience during the war. In the most important revision of American immigration law in nearly two decades, the U.S. government in 1943 dropped its ban on the immigration of the Chinese and instead placed China in the quota system with 105 annual visas and accompanying naturalization rights.

A number of factors brought about this reform. The Chinese stood as the United States’ key and indispensable ally in Asia, and the United States’ discriminatory immigration policies irked China. The decades-long educational exchange programs that brought thousands of Chinese to American universities effectively combated stereotypes of the Chinese as fit only for unskilled labor. Finally, the war also changed how

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