Growing up Japanese in post-World War II America, Saito wanted to be treated like all the other kids. He wanted them to stop calling him a “dirty Jap.”
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“I always felt wrong for being Japanese,” Saito, 79, said on a recent evening as he reflected on a lifelong battle with depression after being imprisoned for three years of his childhood at a camp in the Utah desert.
At a time when the nation has deeply polarized views on immigration and in the wake of campaign vows by President-elect Donald Trump to create a Muslim registry, build a wall on the Mexican border and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, some experts say the mass incarceration of more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry 75 years ago during World War II offers a lesson about the long-term effects of policies that isolate certain minority groups from the rest of society.
While Trump and his supporters have softened their stance on the idea of a registry and offered no detailed plans for how a wall would be built or how immigrants would be identified and deported, the lack of specific information has left many uncertain, anxious and fearful.
Rounding up 2 million to 3 million immigrants, as Trump has suggested, would require a massive detention infrastructure reminiscent of the War Relocation Authority camps where the Japanese were held, experts said. A Muslim registry would stigmatize the community for their beliefs in the same way that the Japanese were demonized for the way they looked.
“It’s pretty much the same kind of logic that was deployed in the 40s and it’s being redeployed,” said Nayan Shah, a professor of American studies and ethnicity and history at USC.
Japanese-Americans who lived through the incarceration or whose parents were in the camps say the negative rhetoric about Muslims and immigrants today reminds them of the racism they encountered decades ago and how damaging the experience was to the health and well-being of their community.