Japanese-American Reparations Law Upheld

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the 1988 law that granted reparations to Japanese-Americans interned by the United States during World War II, rejecting a challenge by a German-American internee who argued that the law is unconstitutional because it discriminates on the basis of national origin.

Arthur D. Jacobs had alleged that he suffered the same injustice as Americans of Japanese ancestry when he, at age 12, accompanied his German-born parents to an internment camp in Crystal City, Tex. Jacobs was interned with American-born ethnic Japanese children and given identical treatment, but claimed he was unfairly denied the $20,000 payment each of them is eligible for under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

In a unanimous decision released Friday, a three-judge panel of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia dismissed Jacobs’ suit. The court agreed with Congress that unlike other “enemy aliens,” Japanese-Americans were detained en masse because of racial prejudice and demagoguery, and were thus entitled to special relief.

“Congress’ finding that Japanese-Americans were the victims of prejudice, while German-Americans were not, is broad enough to cover children as well as adults; and it is amply supported by historical evidence that the internment policy extended to Japanese-American but not to German-American children,” wrote Chief Judge Abner J. Mikva.

Jacobs said Friday that the law and the court’s decision were based on a flawed investigation by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.

The commission examined the internment of Americans of German and Italian ancestry, but concluded that their treatment was “much more individualized and selective” than the actions taken against the ethnic Japanese.

About 120,000 ethnic Japanese, two-thirds of them American citizens, were sent to relocation camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. According to government documents cited by Jacobs, 14,426 European “enemy aliens” were also detained.

However, that was only a small percentage of the more than 1 million German and Italian aliens living in the United States, while virtually all the Japanese on the West Coast were held. Moreover, Congress found that Europeans were given individual hearings on their guilt or innocence, but Japanese were not--a finding Jacobs disputed.

“The court has been misled by whoever misled Congress,” said Jacobs, a retired U. S. Air Force major now living in Tempe, Ariz. “There is a great deal of misinformation about internment and relocation in the United States.”

Jacobs said he will appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court.