What Are Japanese Internment Camps Wrong

After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the start of World War II for the U.S, the government decided that, to keep this country safe, to imprison all people of japanese heritage in internment camps. Japanese Americans were forced to sell their land and most of their belongings and travel on buses to where they would live for the next 5 years. They were forced into quickly built camps, and sometimes forced to build the place they were living in. Most of the living quarters were repurposed horse stables, and multiple families were crowded together in them. In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rescinded Executive Order 9066, shutting down the camps. The last camp was closed by the end of 1945. Japanese Americans were given a one way plane ticket to anywhere in the country, because they had been forced to sell their homes before leaving. Many Japanese Americans lived in poverty after leaving the camps, because they had lost everything. The internment of Japanese Americans was wrong because imprisoning American citizens isn’t right, and they were imprisoned without a jury or trial.

In a TED talk presented by George Takei, he talks about how he spent his early life in a internment camp. He says, “I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of american internment camps and that part of my life is something that I have”(“Why I love the country that once betrayed me”). On the other hand, some people justify it by saying that the camps were there to protect them from racism and enemy attacks. George Takei responds to that in his TED talk by saying, “If the camps were here to protect us, why were the machine guns in the towers pointing at us?”(Why I love the country that once betrayed