House OKs Funds for War Internees : Reparations: The payments to Japanese-Americans would start next year. Senate must now act on the bill.

Overriding objections by budget conservatives, the House voted Thursday to begin making $1.2 billion in reparation payments next year to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

“This was a day of reckoning for the House on the issue of redress,” said Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento). “I consider the outcome a major victory not only for those who were interned but for the country. It’s clear now that Congress has lived up to its moral obligation.”

Already passed by the Senate and now approved by the House, 249 to 166, the bill provides for $20,000 to be paid to each of the estimated 60,000 surviving internees over a three-year period. The first $500 million will be available to the oldest internees next October, the start of the 1991 fiscal year.

Another $500 million will be paid in 1992, with the remaining $200 million to be paid the following year.

The payments, authorized by a 1988 law but never funded previously, were included as an entitlement program in a $17.2-billion appropriations bill for the departments of Commerce, Justice and State. As an entitlement, the payments would be guaranteed just as Social Security checks and funding for Medicare are guaranteed.

Leading the House fight against the measure, Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.) said that, while no one disputes the need for the payments, other spending should have higher priority.

“Do you elevate these payments above child care? Are they more important than fighting drugs? More important than education?” he asked.

The bill now moves back to the Senate, which must give its final approval to the overall package before sending it to the White House for President Bush’s signature.

“We have received no indication yet of the President’s position, but we expect him to sign the legislation, assuming he has no problems with the rest of the appropriations bill,” an aide to Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose) said.

The House vote followed an emotional debate that pitted what proponents of the payments said is a moral obligation to redress the wrongs done to Japanese-Americans against the needs of other programs that, some conservatives argued, should have a higher funding priority.

“There has been a lot of shuffling around on how to pay for this but the House vote finally settles that issue,” one of Matsui’s aides added.

Under the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, Congress voted to pay each of the surviving Japanese-American internees $20,000 as compensation for their internment during World War II.

Funding remained a problem, however, until the Senate earlier this year agreed to turn the payments into an entitlement program.

Now that the House has concurred with the decision, the way is clear for Congress “to disperse the redress compensation as quickly as possible,” said Mineta, who, as a child, was interned in one of the camps.

Under the three-year payment plan adopted by the Senate and approved by the House, the $20,000 in reparations will be sent to surviving internees according to a priority list based on seniority, with the oldest survivors receiving compensation first.

Proponents of the payments have noted that, as a result of their advanced age, about 200 former internees are dying every month--a mortality rate that lends urgency to the need to compensate them as the law requires.

“Unfortunately, many of the interned will die before their payments arrive because budgetary restraints this year have forced the payments to be delayed,” Matsui said.

BACKGROUND

Some 120,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up and interned after the bombing of Pearl Harbor--an action that many lawmakers have labeled an “American shame.” In 1988, Congress passed a law to compensate the estimated 60,000 surviving internees with payments of $20,000 each. But funding problems, along with arguments about higher budgetary priorities, have delayed the payments.