Executive Order 9066 and the Immigrants Barred From Citizenship

On February 19, 1942, ten weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It never mentioned Japanese Americans. It authorized military commanders to designate areas from which "any or all persons may be excluded," and it left the choosing to the generals. Within months, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast had been ordered from their homes, held in temporary assembly centres at racetracks and fairgrounds, and moved to camps in desert and swamp country. Roughly two-thirds of them were American citizens by birth. The other third were their parents, the generation the community called Issei, and the order caught them in a trap the law had built decades earlier. Many had lived in the United States for thirty or forty years. They were not citizens because the government had made sure they could never become citizens.

In short: The Issei, Japanese immigrants who arrived before 1924, were barred from naturalization by race, and state laws then used that bar to keep them from owning farmland. When Executive Order 9066 came, they lost homes, farms and businesses alongside their American-born children, and it took until 1988 for Congress to apologize and pay survivors.

The phrase "free white persons"

The first naturalization law, passed in 1790, limited citizenship by naturalization to "free white persons." After the Civil War, Congress extended naturalization to people of African descent in 1870. It did not open it to Asians. For decades, courts were left to decide who counted as "white," and the answers were as arbitrary as that sounds.

In 1922, the Supreme Court took up the case of Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant who had lived in the United States for nearly three decades, attended the University of California, raised his children to speak English and, by any ordinary measure, had built an American life. He argued that he should be considered white. The Court unanimously disagreed, holding that the term referred to people of what it called the Caucasian race. A few months later, in the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian immigrant and U.S. Army veteran who argued that he was Caucasian by the anthropology of the day, the Court changed its reasoning and said "white" meant what the common man understood it to mean, which did not include him either.

The two decisions are contradictory on their face. Taken together, they made one thing perfectly clear: whatever test the courts used, Asian immigrants would fail it. The Issei became, in the formal language of later statutes, "aliens ineligible to citizenship."

How a racial bar became a land bar

That phrase did a great deal of quiet work. California's Alien Land Law of 1913 barred "aliens ineligible to citizenship" from owning agricultural land and limited their leases. The law never mentioned Japanese immigrants. It did not have to. Because federal naturalization law already excluded Asians, a land law aimed at "ineligible" aliens landed exactly where its authors intended. A tighter version passed by ballot initiative in 1920, and other Western states adopted similar laws.

Japanese immigrant farmers had become enormously productive in California agriculture, often on marginal land they had cleared and irrigated themselves. The land laws were designed to cap that success. Families adapted the only way they could, by putting land in the names of their American-born children, who as citizens could own property. Some worked through white friends or attorneys who held title on their behalf. Those arrangements were legal, risky and, as the 1940s would show, fragile.

Then came the Immigration Act of 1924, which barred the admission of "aliens ineligible to citizenship" altogether. Its effect was to end immigration from Japan. The Issei generation was closed. No new arrivals would join them, and none of them could become citizens.

So by 1941, the Issei were legally frozen. They could not naturalize. In several states they could not own farmland. They could not vote for the officials who would decide what happened to them. Their children could do all those things, but many were still young.

The order and the generals

In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested Issei community leaders, including Buddhist priests, Japanese-language teachers and newspaper editors, as enemy aliens under existing wartime authority. That was only the beginning.

Executive Order 9066 gave Lieutenant General John DeWitt, who led the Western Defense Command, the authority he had been asking for. He issued a series of proclamations and civilian exclusion orders, posted on telephone poles and storefronts, telling people of Japanese ancestry in designated areas where to report and what they could carry. Typically that meant only what a family could hold in their hands.

Families had days, sometimes less, to dispose of everything else. Farms were sold at a fraction of their value or left with neighbours who promised to care for them. Fishing boats, shops, cars and household goods went the same way. Some families came back years later to find their property tended and waiting. Many found it gone.

Fishing families on Terminal Island, in the Port of Los Angeles, were among the first removed, given only a short window to leave. Strawberry growers in the Central Coast valleys, flower growers around San Francisco Bay and truck farmers outside Seattle lost seasons of planting and, often, the land itself. The Issei who had leased rather than owned, because the land laws left them no other choice, had nothing to come back to. A legal disability imposed in 1913 became, three decades later, a reason they had so little to protect.

The War Relocation Authority ran ten camps, among them Manzanar in California, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Minidoka in Idaho, Topaz in Utah, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, and two in Arkansas. Families lived in barracks behind barbed wire under armed guard. Rooms were partitioned by thin walls, meals were taken in mess halls, and parents watched the ordinary authority of family life drain away as children ate with friends and adults took camp jobs paying a small fraction of outside wages.

Loyalty questions for people denied a country

In 1943, the government gave adults in the camps a questionnaire meant to assess loyalty and recruit soldiers. Two of its questions became notorious. One asked whether the person would serve in the U.S. armed forces. The other asked whether they would swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and forswear allegiance to the Japanese emperor.

For the American-born children, the questions were insulting but answerable. For the Issei, the second question posed an impossible choice. The United States had barred them from becoming citizens. If they renounced their Japanese nationality, they would become stateless, people with no country at all. Many answered with qualifications or refused, and the government treated many of those who answered "no" to both questions as disloyal, sending them to a segregated camp at Tule Lake.

Meanwhile, thousands of young Nisei men from the camps and from Hawaii served in the U.S. Army, many in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which became one of the most decorated units of its size in American history. Their parents watched them go to war for a country that had imprisoned them and refused to let the parents join it.

What the Court said, and unsaid

The Supreme Court upheld the exclusion in Korematsu v. United States on December 18, 1944, by a vote of 6 to 3. Fred Korematsu, a welder from Oakland, had refused to leave. The majority accepted the government's claim of military necessity. Justices Frank Murphy, Robert Jackson and Owen Roberts dissented. On the same day, in Ex parte Endo, the Court held that the government could not continue to detain a citizen whose loyalty it conceded, which helped bring the camps to an end.

Decades later, researchers found that the government had withheld evidence from the Court, including intelligence reports that contradicted the claim of widespread disloyalty. In 1983, a federal judge in San Francisco vacated Korematsu's conviction. And in 2018, in Trump v. Hawaii, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Korematsu "was gravely wrong the day it was decided," while the Court upheld the travel ban at issue in that case on other grounds. Our court watch page follows how today's Court handles claims of national-security necessity.

The repair, and its limits

The racial bar on naturalization finally fell with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, and many elderly Issei took the citizenship oath in the years after. California's alien land laws were weakened by the courts and finally repealed by voters in 1956.

Compensation came slowly and partially. Congress passed an evacuation claims act in 1948 that repaid only a small fraction of documented losses. A larger reckoning required a generation of organizing by Japanese Americans. A federal commission appointed in 1980 held hearings across the country and concluded in its 1983 report that the incarceration had been caused by "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership," not military necessity.

On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which formally apologized on behalf of the nation and provided $20,000 to each surviving person who had been incarcerated. Republicans and Democrats both supported it. Many Issei did not live to see it; most had died by then.

What the Issei story teaches about citizenship

It is tempting to read 1942 as an act of wartime panic. Panic was part of it. But the Issei could be stripped of everything so quickly because the law had already prepared them as targets. Decades of statutes and court decisions had defined them as permanent outsiders. When the emergency came, the machinery was ready.

That is the lesson worth carrying forward. Arguments over who can become a citizen, and on what terms, are not abstract. They decide who can own land, who can vote, who has standing to object. A group excluded from citizenship is a group excluded from the political protection that citizenship provides. The Supreme Court's 2026 ruling in Trump v. Barbara, confirming that children born in the United States to parents here unlawfully or temporarily are citizens at birth, stands in a long line of fights over exactly this question. Our racial justice topic page follows those fights now.

The people who refused

Not everyone complied. Three young Nisei men chose, separately, to test the orders in court, and their names became part of constitutional law.

Gordon Hirabayashi, a student at the University of Washington, deliberately violated the curfew and turned himself in to the FBI. Minoru Yasui, a lawyer in Oregon, broke the curfew to test it. Fred Korematsu, in California, did not report for removal and tried to stay with his life. The Supreme Court upheld the curfew convictions of Hirabayashi and Yasui in 1943 and Korematsu's conviction in 1944.

Forty years later, legal teams working with newly discovered government documents reopened all three cases through a rare procedure that lets a court correct a fundamental error after a sentence has been served. Korematsu's conviction was vacated in 1983. Hirabayashi's convictions were later vacated after an appeals court ruling in 1987. Yasui's case was dismissed as moot after the government asked to vacate his conviction, and he died before the matter was fully resolved. In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

There was resistance inside the camps too. When the Army began drafting young men from behind the barbed wire in 1944, a group at Heart Mountain in Wyoming organized as the Fair Play Committee and refused to report until their families' rights were restored. Dozens were tried and convicted of draft evasion and sent to federal prison. Their stance divided the community for decades; some regarded them as heroes of conscience, others as having undermined the soldiers who served. In 1947, President Harry Truman pardoned them. Their story, long left out of the official histories, is now taught alongside that of the 442nd, which seems right. Both were answers to the same injustice.

One more contrast clarifies how much of the policy was choice rather than necessity. In Hawaii, which had actually been attacked and which had a far larger share of residents of Japanese ancestry than the West Coast, no mass removal took place. Military authorities there imposed martial law and detained a relatively small number of people, in large part because the islands' economy could not function without the Japanese American community. On the mainland, where the population was smaller and the military threat more remote, everyone was sent away.

What you can do

• Visit or support a camp site. Several former camp sites, including Manzanar and Minidoka, are preserved by the National Park Service. Visiting, or supporting the community groups that run pilgrimages and oral-history projects, keeps the story concrete.
• Back the organizations that carry the memory into current fights. Japanese American civil rights groups have spoken out on post-9/11 policies and on immigration detention. Our directory of nonprofits lists civil-rights and immigrant-rights groups in every state.
• Pay attention to laws that turn status into exclusion. The land laws worked by hooking property rights to citizenship rules. When modern proposals tie housing, licensing or benefits to immigration status, ask what the old land laws would say about them.
• Read the commission's report. The 1983 federal report on the incarceration is public, readable and devastating. It is the best antidote to the idea that what happened was simply a misunderstanding.

The Issei were told they could never belong, and then punished for not belonging. The apology came late. The vigilance it asks of us is due now.