Roger Daniels, in Prisoners Without Trials: Japanese Americans in World War II, makes clear that the internment of Japanese-Americans was not simply a fluke that was justifiable during wartime. To the contrary, that internment was part and parcel of both the long American history of prejudice and discrimination against minorities in general (Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, etc.) and especially against Asian Americans.
The argument that the interment was justified because Japanese Americans posed a threat to the security of the United States ignores the fact that Italian Americans and German Americans were not rounded up and placed in internment camps. This was true despite the fact that Germany and Italy were enemies in World War II along with Japan. The racism of the American government and the people who allowed internment to occur is evident in such a discriminatory decision, for of the three enemies in World War II, only the Japanese stood out in appearance from other Americans. Had Germany and Italy been located in Asia, or Africa, meaning that German Americans and Italian Americans would have appeared "foreign" to Americans, it is likely that German Americans and Italian Americans would have been locked up in internment camps as well.
Daniels points out that the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans was unjustified on military or security grounds and that this finding was delivered not by a group of Japanese Americans, not by a civil rights organization, but in 1981 by the Presidential Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. In other words, the government which interned Japanese Americans during World War II is the same government which forty years later determined that the internment was unjustified and was instead an action based on racism and politics.
On one hand, the internment of a group of Americans solely on the basis of their nationality and appearance ha...