MAKING AMENDS FOR KOREMATSU.

• Author: Riggs, Mike
• Position: HISTORY - Korematsu v. United States

IF THERE IS a silver lining to the Supreme Court's summer ruling in Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld President Donald Trump's ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries, it's that the Court finally denounced its own error in Korematsu v. United States. That 1944 ruling validated Franklin Delano Roosevelt's order to relocate and imprison 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants during World War II. It has been a blight on the Supreme Court's record ever since.

Signed by FDR in February 1942, Executive Order 9066 was a brutal and authoritarian document rooted in fear, racial prejudice, and sweeping generalizations unsupported by the data then available to policymakers.

After the Japanese navy's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, fear of a West Coast invasion seized California. The state was home to a large population of Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants, who had made their way east after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 repealed a centuries-old law prohibiting Japanese citizens from emigrating. Many of those newly liberated Japanese settled in California, where they quickly aroused the same paranoid anti-immigration sentiments seen in other parts of the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century.

What did Californians of Western European descent fear? What nativists have always feared: competition. They worried that the Japanese would out-reproduce them; that, if allowed to own land, they would become wealthy at the expense of whites; and that the traditions they brought with them would corrupt American culture.

In response to these concerns, California passed the Alien Land Law of 1913, which prohibited non-citizens from owning property or even signing long-term leases. This restricted Japanese immigrants--many of whom could not obtain citizenship under the terms of the 1790 Naturalization Act--to lower-level farming jobs and short-term housing arrangements. Amendments to the law in 1920 and 1923 codified further deprivations, and then, after Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, Californians were able to close their state almost entirely to Asia.

WHEN THE SMOKE cleared in Hawaii, it was easy for white Americans on the Pacific coast to see their Asian neighbors as potential subversives--not because Japanese Americans openly worshipped Emperor Hirohito, but because they'd already been dehumanized by decades of anti-immigrant politicking. While no loyal American cheered the attack on Pearl Harbor, some...