Immigration Article of the Day: Americans’ Misuse of “Internment” by Yoshinori H.T. Himel
Americans’ Misuse of “Internment” by Yoshinori H.T. Himel, Seattle Journal for Social Justice: Vol. 14: Iss. 3, Article 12.
Many Americans have used the word “internment” to denote World War II’s civil liberties calamity of mass, race-based, nonselective forced removal and incarceration of well over 110,000 Japanese American civilians, most of them American citizens. But the word “internment,” a term of art in the international law of war, does not describe that community-wide incarceration. Instead, it invokes an internationally agreed legal scheme under which a warring country may incarcerate enemy soldiers and selected civilian subjects of an enemy power. As this paper reflects, under the law, alienage is basic to civilian internment. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) indeed selected and interned thousands of Issei aliens (members of the Japanese American community’s first or immigrant generation, aliens because they were statutorily barred from naturalization). Additionally, thousands of Nisei (members of the Japanese American community’s second generation, US citizens by birthright) renounced their US citizenship; DOJ then classified them as aliens and interned them. Although the precise numbers may be uncertain, well over 7,000 Issei from the mainland, Hawai’i, and Alaska, and well over 5,000 Nisei renunciants, involuntarily became DOJ internees. These Japanese American alien internments, the legal context surrounding them, and the human stories behind them are worthy of attention. Currently, the National Park Service and others are paying increased attention to the sites of Japanese alien internment and their histories in two ways. First, the park service recently has financially assisted nonfederal organizations in interpreting DOJ internment camps. These include the Santa Fe Internment Camp,8 Fort Abraham Lincoln, near Bismarck, North
Dakota,9 Tuna Canyon, in southern California,10 Fort Missoula internment camp in Montana, and Crystal City Family Internment Camp in Crystal City, Texas. Second, as a federal land management agency the park service has begun to manage, research, and interpret national monument sites at Honouliuli, an army internment camp on Oahu, Hawai’i, and at Tule Lake, a concentration camp in northern California. Tule Lake briefly became a DOJ internment camp for newly created aliens in the Japanese American community in an extraordinary wartime transformation discussed below.
The problem this paper addresses—conflation of mass incarceration with internment—may stem in part from our relative lack of discussion of Japanese alien internment. University of Washington Professor Tetsuden Kashima says that most literature on the Japanese American imprisonment concentrates on mass incarceration, not alien internment (notable exceptions include the cited book itself). Kashima gives three reasons for the literature’s disproportional emphasis on the “assembly centers and relocation centers.” “First, they held the largest number of inmates. Second, these inmates were mostly American citizens, a fact that epitomizes the injustice of a government incarcerating its own citizens. Third, the most accessible government documents and other source materials pertain to these two types of centers.” This author hopes that scholars, like the park service and perhaps in cooperation with it, will develop further our nation’s awareness and discussion of its Japanese alien internment. More discussion of Japanese alien internment may multiply the occasions for confusion because the word’s misuse generates ambiguity. But more discussion of internment also offers reason and opportunity to prevent any such ambiguity. To stop misleading ourselves and the public, we as lawyers and Americans should take this opportunity to restrict “internment” to its correct legal meaning.
KJ