Human race tend to hold fear towards people who are foreign or unfamiliar to them. This sense of xenophobia is prevalent across world history, often characterized by implementation of racialized discriminatory immigration practices. In this essay, I am going to compare and contrast the history of the Japanese internment in the United States during WWII with recent European Union processes.
In 1942, President Roosevelt executed an enforced relocation of Japanese citizens and immigrants, which lasted for four years. It was officially declared as an authorized evacuation of all “enemy aliens” from designated areas within US including entire West Coast. These so-called, “enemy aliens” included Germans, Italians, and Japanese; however, the order was enforced only against Japanese-origin people: “within 6 months, federal government ordered arrest of 120,000 persons of Japanese descent, which 70,000 of them were US citizens by birth” (). Furthermore, the internees consisted of “30 University of California faculty and research assistants, and 400 undergraduate students” (). These internment camps were dispersed throughout the rural areas of the country: “California, Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho” (). It was difficult for the Americans to escape a conviction that …show more content…
Here, limited access to civil, social, and political rights, hyper-criminalization, hyper-incarceration, and the constant threat of deportation contribute to the creation of a grey area of legal vulnerability – or ‘eternal probation’, as Daniel Kanstroom has defined it – which in turn constrains the socioeconomic opportunities of migrant workers and contributes to their insertion in the most precarious and insecure sectors of the post-Fordist economy, as well as in the lower regions of the illegal
In 1942, President Roosevelt executed an enforced relocation of Japanese citizens and immigrants, which lasted for four years. It was officially declared as an authorized evacuation of all “enemy aliens” from designated areas within US including entire West Coast. These so-called, “enemy aliens” included Germans, Italians, and Japanese; however, the order was enforced only against Japanese-origin people: “within 6 months, federal government ordered arrest of 120,000 persons of Japanese descent, which 70,000 of them were US citizens by birth” (). Furthermore, the internees consisted of “30 University of California faculty and research assistants, and 400 undergraduate students” (). These internment camps were dispersed throughout the rural areas of the country: “California, Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho” (). It was difficult for the Americans to escape a conviction that …show more content…
Here, limited access to civil, social, and political rights, hyper-criminalization, hyper-incarceration, and the constant threat of deportation contribute to the creation of a grey area of legal vulnerability – or ‘eternal probation’, as Daniel Kanstroom has defined it – which in turn constrains the socioeconomic opportunities of migrant workers and contributes to their insertion in the most precarious and insecure sectors of the post-Fordist economy, as well as in the lower regions of the illegal