JAPANESE INTERNMENT
Friday, February 19 — On this date in 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order requiring Japanese-Americans living along the Pacific Coast to be relocated inland. This order affected some 77,000 citizens and 43,000 resident aliens. The Japanese-American internment lasted throughout the Second World War, and the camps closed by early 1946. The dislocation caused by the internment order singling out an ancestry group came to be widely regretted and led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, formally apologizing for the action and offering financial restitution.
Today in the U.S., there are an estimated 1.37 million residents of Japanese ancestry. Over 48 percent of that total is mixed with other ethnicities and races.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
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