My latest op-ed piece, “Reparations for internment were just a curtsy to political correctness,” appears in the San Francisco Chronicle today. An excerpt:

Although it was almost universally hailed at the time, the decision was one of Reagan’s biggest blunders. In a rare capitulation to political correctness, Reagan ignored the advice of his own military and legal experts who opposed wartime reparations for ethnic Japanese evacuees and internees. The road to reparations was paved with injustice, intellectual dishonesty and incompetence. The panel created by Congress to assess whether the evacuation and relocation of West Coast ethnic Japanese were militarily necessary didn’t include anyone with a military or intelligence background. The 500-page report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians devoted just 10 pages to intelligence.

Worse, the commission failed to acknowledge the existence of long- declassified MAGIC cables — which revealed Japan’s extensive espionage activities on the West Coast — until after it had published its famous indictment that wartime relocation and internment were the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” The commission’s legal counsel hastily dismissed MAGIC’s importance in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to approve Executive Order 9066 and the West Coast evacuation.

Update: Amy Hara points out in the King County Journal that dead Japanese-Americans did not receive reparations. Apparently Amy is under the false impression that I said reparations checks were inserted into the coffins of deceased ethnic Japanese evacuees and internees. Thanks for setting the record straight, Amy! I’ll be sure to file your correction with the Department of Obvious Truths.

Update II: Over at Free Republic, where my reparations op-ed was posted, the question has come up as to the citizenship of the 112,000 ethnic Japanese who were forced to leave the West Coast during WW II. Nearly 40 percent of the evacuees were Japanese enemy aliens (permanent resident aliens). In almost all cases, U.S. law precluded Japanese aliens from becoming U.S. citizens.

Almost all of the rest of the evacuees were Nisei (i.e., the U.S.-born children of Japanese immigrants). Many of the Nisei were children. Among the Nisei adults, the overwhelming majority were dual citizens (that is, citizens of both the U.S. and Japan); though critics of FDR’s homeland security policies pooh-pooh dual citizenship, it is estimated that thousands of Nisei dual citizens served in the Japanese military–a fact that indicates that at least some Nisei dual citizens took their Japanese citizenship seriously.

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