ing World War II. It has been a blight on the
Supreme Court’s record ever since.
Signed by FDR in February 1942, Exec-
utive Order 9066 was a brutal and authori-
tarian document rooted in fear, racial
prejudice, and sweeping generalizations
unsupported by the data then available to
policy makers.
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 popula-
tion 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1868 repealed a centuries-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 liber-
ated Japanese settled in Cal-
ifornia, where they quickly
aroused the same paranoid
anti-immigration senti-
ments 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 Japa-
nese would out-reproduce
them; that, if allowed to own
land, they would become
wealthy at the expense of
whites; and that the tradi-
tions they brought with
them would corrupt Ameri-
can culture.
In response to these
concerns, California passed
the Alien Land Law of 1913,
which prohibited non-citi-
zens from owning property
or even signing long-term
leases. This restricted Japa-
nese 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 depriva-
tions, and then, after Congress passed
the Immigration Act of 1924, Califor-
nians 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 neighborsIF 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 dur-16 OCTOBER 2018 Photo: Fred Korematsu; Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty ImagesHISTORY
MAKING
AMENDS FOR
KOREMATSU
MIKE RIGGS