Talk:Japanese-American internment/restructured
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PLEASE NOTE: This page is a proposed restructuring of the article. It is placed here for discussion about the structure (i.e., organization) and not about the content of the article. A limited amount of copy was removed from this restructuring, mainly because the content was clearly not appropriate for the article. In the spirit of full disclosure, the removed content has been logged on a separate subpage along with reasons for the removals. If you believe any of the removed text should remain in the article, please suggest a section where this text would be most appropriate. If you disagree with another editor's appeal for restoring text, please hold that discussion until (and if) the restructured article is promoted to the main article. Assuming we obtain consensus on the restructuring, we can revisit the issue of removed text. Please remember that the original article is intact and in place, so no text has actually been removed from the article. For emphasis, let me restate that this page is only to discuss a restructuring of the article, and I would like to avoid extended discussions about content (i.e., specific paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or words). Please do not post discussion comments on this page. See the Talk page for additional comments and discussion. --ishu 14:48, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
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Japanese American Internment refers to the forcible relocation of approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, 62 percent of whom were United States citizens from the west coast during World War II to hastily constructed housing facilities called "War Relocation Camps" in remote portions of the nation's interior. The American camps were only meant to isolate the Japanese, in contrast to the Nazi concentration camps which existed to eliminate their captives.
President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones", from which "any or all persons may be excluded." Twelve days later, this power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington. Some U.S. residents of German and Italian descent across the country were also arrested and interned when deemed to be security risks on an individual basis (rather than as an entire community). In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion, removal, and detention, arguing that it is permissible to curtail the civil rights of a racial group when there is a "pressing public necessity."
Some compensation for property losses was paid in 1948, but most internees were unable to fully recover their losses. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan officially apologized for the internment, on behalf of the U.S. government. The official apology said that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership", and beginning in 1990, the government paid reparations to surviving internees.
Similar internments occurred across Canada as well. (See: Japanese Canadian internment)