Government surveillance. ongoing since 1935. had identified some two thousand potentially subversive persons In the Japanese community. Along with fourteen thousand German and Italian security risks nationwide. they were quietly rounded up in the last days of 1941. But those individual detentions stopped well short of wholesale incarcerations. "I was determined." Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote. "to avoid mass internment. and the persecution of aliens that had characterized the First World War." In fact. the immigrants whose loyalty had been questioned during World War I had then been freshly arrived and seemed to many observers unarguably alien. But by 1941 those older European groups were settled communities. well assimilated. their patriotism as well as their political loyalty actively cultivated by Roosevelts New Deal. Though a surprising six hundred thousand Italiansmore than 10 percent of the entire ItalianAmerican communityremained Italian citizens and were automatically labeled "enemy aliens" after Mussolinis declaration of war.
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immigrants