In Don Flood’s latest rant against our immigration policies, he has amazingly achieved a new low in his discourse. How? More on that in a bit.
First off, I want to make it quite clear that I have strongly opposed Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy as it relates to forcibly separating children from those adults who have illegally crossed our borders from the get-go. I’m not going to try to defend the indefensible. It is really time for our elected officials to come up with both effective and humane policies regarding our immigration laws. Both parties are equally culpable in these matters.
However, in examining Mr. Flood’s entire letter, he uses a kind of plot device to drive home his negative views regarding Mr. Trump and his immigration policies. He started off by briefly describing in a few paragraphs the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He concludes that “we are arguably worse” as a nation today and tries to almost excuse this hideous act by saying Americans “were responding to a real-life attack in which some 2,400 Americans died.”
Here are some details about the internment that Mr. Flood failed to mention. After President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in the winter of 1942, between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced into guarded camps, mainly on the West Coast. Most of these victims were actually American citizens!
The suffering and despair in these camps were widespread. This atrocity did not fully end until the spring of 1946.
Although President Reagan signed a bill in 1988 that formally apologized on behalf of the U.S. government and paid out reparations to over 80,000 victims and their heirs, for many thousands of families the damage was irreparable.
Since Mr. Flood likes to make “arguable” statements I’ll make a few of my own. Since the end of the Civil War, the forced internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II for as many as four years, not because they committed any crimes but simply because of their DNA is arguably the most racist, vile, and despicable act of any American president.
What President Roosevelt did in 1942 (along with the support of many Americans and congressmen) is arguably a thousand times worse than what is going on at our border today. To conflate these two issues as if they were equally malicious is offensive at best.
Brian Gillespie
Milton
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