Shoulders of giants
What's more American than members of established groups passing on their knowledge to new immigrants; lending a helping hand that can be something as simple as a nod of acknowledgment that I've been there, you'll make it too?
We're a great country because of this continual cycle of renewal, a refusal to let newcomers fend for themselves. Implicit in this national ethos is a recognition that otherwise, it--however you want to definite it--can happen again.
Times change, but only because we make sure they do:
Relatives of Interned Japanese-Americans Side With Muslims, Nina Bernstein in the Times: Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin. The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants held after 9/11. But Ms. Yasui, an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, had reason to take it personally.Corbis photo by Dorothea Lange in the Times.
Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enemy aliens during World War II. And her father was one of three Japanese-Americans who challenged the government’s racial detention and curfew programs in litigation that reached the Supreme Court in the 1940s.
Now, Ms. Yasui, along with Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu-Haigh, a son and a daughter of the two other Japanese-American litigants, is urging an appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the sweeping language of the judge’s ruling last year.
The ruling “painfully resurrects the long-discredited legal theory” that was used to put their grandparents behind barbed wire, along with the rest of the West Coast’s Japanese alien population, the three contend in an unusual friends-of-the-court brief filed today in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
“Their interest is in avoiding the repetition of a tragic episode in American history that is also, for them, painful family history,” the brief states.
In recent years, many scholars have drawn parallels and contrasts between the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the treatment of hundreds of Muslim noncitizens who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, then held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported.
But the brief filed today is a rare case of members of a third generation stepping up to defend legal protections that were lost to their grandparents, and that their parents devoted their lives to reclaiming.
“I feel that racial profiling is absolutely wrong and unjustifiable,” Ms. Yasui, 53, wrote in an e-mail message from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she works as a writer and graphic designer. “That my grandmother was treated by the U.S. government as a ‘dangerous enemy alien’ was a travesty. And it killed my grandfather.” ...
The brief counters that the ruling “overlooks the nearly 20-year-old declaration by the United States Congress and the president of the United States that the racially selective detention of Japanese aliens during World War II was a ‘fundamental injustice’ warranting an apology and the payment of reparations.”
And, it adds, the district court’s deference to the government “ignores the tragic consequences of such deference” for 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
Among those people was Ms. Yasui’s grandfather Masuo Yasui, who immigrated to the United States in 1903 and became a successful businessman and apple grower in Hood River, Ore., where his nine children were born and raised.
By 1940, he was one of 47,000 Japanese immigrants who lived in the 48 states, nearly 90 percent on the West Coast. They had remained aliens because federal law forbade naturalization of any person of Asian ancestry. Since the law also forbade Japanese immigration after 1924, the United States had been home to all of them for at least 17 years on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. ...
The Hirabayashi and Korematsu grandparents, too, died before Congress enacted a law apologizing for the internment and offering compensation of $20,000 each for the survivors. Signed into law in 1988, the law was intended partly “to discourage the occurrence of similar injustice and violations of civil liberties in the future.”
By then, courts re-examining the cases of the three Japanese-American litigants found that the government had suppressed evidence that security fears were overblown. For example, what the Army had suspected were signals sent to Japanese submarines from California hillsides had actually come from “farms where people used flashlights to go to outside toilets,” a former Justice Department lawyer testified.
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