“They’re stealing our jobs. They’ve made housing too expensive. They’re leeching us dry of government benefits. Send them back where they belong.”
“Never again!” comes the cry.
Federal agents swarm major cities as well as quiet farm communities, pounding on doors and dragging immigrants from their beds. Men are arrested in front of wives and children, made to stand in the cold wearing just their bathrobes and slippers—no mention of how long they’ll be detained.
The F.B.I. has kept a list of potential insurgents, compiled in secrecy for years, profiling suspects based on the color of their skin, the slant of their eyes, and their ethnolinguistic heritage. America has been their home for generations, yet they remain perpetual foreigners.
“America is for Americans!” “Beware the yellow peril!” “Damn them! Let’s get rid of them now!”[1]
And so, within 48 hours of Pearl Harbor, over 1,200 immigrants are taken into custody, held without formal charges and no legal review. Some will be separated from their families for the duration of the war. Others are coerced to self-deport. Calls for incarceration come from congressmen, judges, news media, and even popular figures like Dr. Seuss. By February, the President himself will sign an Executive Order to evacuate all people of Japanese descent from the Pacific West Coast—almost 120,000 in all—two-thirds of them U.S. citizens.
Loyal Americans are forced by law to leave behind their homes, businesses, farmland, friends, neighbors, and communities. They can only bring with them what they can carry in their hands. They are locked in detention centers behind barbed wire, with military guards training their weapons on the occupants within. They are treated as enemies and despised by their own country, while the Christian church remains shamefully silent.
This is my family’s story, as well as America’s story.
Not until forty years later, would Congress denounce the internment as a day of infamy: “A grave injustice was done to both citizens and permanent residents of Japanese ancestry by the evacuation, relocation, and internment of civilians during World War II. . . . These actions were carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage documented by the Commission, and were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”[2]
“Never again!” comes the cry.
Yet how soon we often forget.[3]
[1] For the record of America’s shameful history, see my article on “Racism During the Evacuation” in The Church Behind Barbed Wire or Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America. Presidents from FDR to DJT have led America astray due to idolatrous nationalism, and the Church fails whenever we exalt a nationalistic worldview above our divinely granted purpose to Glorify Christ Again (Matthew 6:33).
[2] For more on these correctives, see “Redress and Reparations.” It should not take an act of Congress, though, or forty years of hindsight to make us recognize we’ve been wrong.
[3] Fearful self-interest always draws out the wickedness of the human heart. And many who applaud the present “war on immigration” are motivated once again by ethnic prejudice, financial greed, and a failure of political leadership. The American people have been fed a false narrative to justify the I.C.E. raids, excessive use of force, and unlawful detention of people made in the image of God. This is not a Christian way to treat precious souls created for eternity (Genesis 1:27). So although we made this mess ourselves with porous borders, serpentine paths to citizenship, and the social media hysteria that removing all “foreigners” will make America great again, let’s not pretend that treating the undocumented as criminals should justify any unjust acts against them or pardon our responsibility to correct each situation in a way that honors Christ.
