Speech #910182005

Mr. Hosokawa has emerged years later to write an important historical account of the course of events preceding and following the Executive order to evacuate JapaneseAmericans to relocation centers. I believe it is of immeasurable importance that we place in the record once and for all that the order to commit American citizens of Japanese ancestry. as well as Japanese aliens who. unfortunately. had no rights to citizenship because of Federal laws denying them naturalization privileges. to detention camps was a mistake. and one of our Governments most grievous errors of World War II. Our inability to resolve the prejudice confronting JapaneseAmericans did not stop there. Since 1789. as aliens of "racially ineligible" to naturalization. Japanese immigrants had no rights to citizenship. Citizenship was denied Japanese aliens until 1952 when. largely through the efforts of the Japanese American Citizens League. they realized their goalthe successful enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. This act eliminated race as a barrier to naturalization and also allowed. for the first time since 1924. a token immigration quota to Japan and other Asian nations. which negated the Oriental Exclusion Acts. I authorized the law. Discriminatory language for Asian immigrants was further eliminated and signed into law by President Johnson in 1965. when the racist national origins systems of allocating immigration opportunities was also abolished. Also. this one. The book. "NISEI: The Quiet Americans." which I recommend to my Senate colleagues. carefully traces the history of Japanese immigration and their early struggles in the United States from 1869 to 1941. Then Pearl Harbor came and the war hysteria reached its peak with the decision to evacuate thousands of Japanese people. mostly American citizens. to socalled relocation camps. The camps lacked the brutality and the ovens of Buchenwald.