How Did Racial Discrimination Affect Japanese Internment Camps?

History HL Internal Assessment Final Rough Draft

To what extent did racial discrimination effect Japanese immigration prior to and in the decades immediately following the WWII internment camps?

Word count: 1940 Identification and evaluation of sources

Starting in the 1800s, Japanese immigrants began their journey to the United States in search of peace and prosperity, leaving an unstable homeland for a life of hard work and the chance to provide a better future for their children. What the immigrants didn’t know was that this was the beginning of a long, grueling fight where they would try their hardest to gain equal rights in the United States. During this investigation, the extent of how racial discrimination effected Japanese immigration

Many Americans worried that citizens of Japanese ancestry would act as spies or saboteurs for the Japanese government. This drove U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign the Executive Order 9066, which ordered all Japanese-Americans to evacuate the West Coast. Even though almost all of the people living in the U.S. with Japanese ancestry were Nisei – a person born in the U.S whose relatives were immigrants from Japan- the military was ordered to remove any persons from any area in the country where national security was at risk. This resulted in the relocation of approximately 120,000 people, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, to one of 10 internment camps located across the country. Ten internment camps were established in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas, eventually holding 120,000 people. The lives of Japanese-Americans were completely changed -- not only were their economic lives destroyed, their emotional security was shattered and their cultural traditions were severely damaged as well. The housing of the internment camps were unpleasant and consisted mostly of tarpaper barracks. The adults in the camps had the choice of working for a salary of $5 per day and the children were required to attend school. Many Japanese-Americans who were

The order was finally repealed, but many found that they could not return to their hometowns. Early in 1945, Japanese-American citizens of undisputed loyalty were allowed to return to the West Coast, but not until March 1946 was the last camp closed. In the years following the war, Japanese Americans worked successfully to remove state discriminatory legislation and to restore full citizenship and land ownership rights. The 1952 passage of the Walter-McCarran Act allowed Japanese immigrants to become naturalized citizens of the United States. The new law ended Japanese exclusion, but was still racially discriminatory. Asian countries were allowed 100 immigrants each, while the national origins quotas of the Immigration Act of 1924 determined immigration from European countries. The McCarran-Walter Act also repealed the racial clauses in the naturalization law of 1790 that forbade non-white immigrants from obtaining American citizenship. Over 46,000 Japanese immigrants, including many elderly Issei, became naturalized citizens by 1965.

Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the national origin quotas and annually permitted the admission of 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere. Twenty thousand immigrants per year per Asian country were allowed to enter the United States. This law opened the way