Ronald Magden isn’t so sure we’ve turned the corner when it comes to racism and what amounts to terrible treatment of immigrants in America. Those were among topics at a recent panel discussion about Japanese-American internment camps at the University of Puget Sound, where Magden was accompanied by author David Patneaude, and author and former internment camp prisoner Hiroshi Kashiwagi.

For those who don’t remember, Japanese-American internment refers to the forced relocation and imprisonment of an estimated 110,000 Japanese-Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942. Based on a presidential order, nearly all Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast were imprisoned out of fear that some citizens were colluding with the then-aggressive Japanese government.

President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19,  1942, which allowed military commanders to designate some dubiously-defined military areas as “exclusion zones” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” For all intents and purposes, it became illegal to be Japanese along most of the West Coast. Tacoma was among the first communities to begin rounding up Japanese citizens. Hundreds of farmers in the White River Valley, which is now occupied by the city of Auburn and other small towns, were forced from their farms, only to have their land transferred to real estate investors, says Magden. Most of the Japanese expelled from the South Sound never returned, he adds. The pain and shame associated with imprisonment was evident on the often smiling face of author, playwright and former prisoner Hiroshi Kashiwagi.

“Talking about this is difficult,” he told the audience, who packed the Wheelock Student Center Rotunda during the second week of March.

During World War II, Kashiwagi and his family were sent to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, an internment camp reserved for Japanese-Americans who refused to answer certain questions on a so-called loyalty questionnaire. That questionnaire asked Kashiwagi if he would be willing to swear allegiance to the government that had unjustly imprisoned them and serve in the U.S. military. Refusal to answer “yes-yes” to those questions made Kashiwagi a so-called No-No Boy — and landed him and his family in the equivalent of a maximum security concentration camp.

Perhaps most alarming is Kashiwagi’s assertion that he believes it could all happen again.
“Quite easily,” he told the audience.

Ron Magden agrees — asserting that much of what’s happening to immigrants in America today is driven by the same social and political motivations that encouraged the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the forced expulsion of Chinese citizens from Tacoma decades earlier.

“Racism was far more open then,” says Magden, a lifelong history teacher who currently holds classes at Tacoma Community College. “I think it’s still there, but it’s much more subtle. It’s not polite to denigrate people of other races, so we just don’t do that anymore. But many of the attitudes don’t seem to have changed.”

America, South Sound included, goes through cycles wherein immigration is encouraged, especially during times when we need cheap labor. But once the railroads or highways or homes are built, or when the economy crashes, the government has a tendency to turn on the people who provided all the cheap labor. Then it gets ugly. A recent surge in anti-immigrant fervor — driven by the terrorism scare and financial woes — bears striking resemblance to episodes in the past, says Magden. Sadly, the government’s actions happen thanks to the complicity of everyday Americans.

“They (people’s motivations) are the same,” says Magden. “The closer we get to a depression, the greater is the demand for immigrants to be sent home. People really want aliens out when the economy tightens up.”