Letter: What did other countries do?

It’s almost Aug. 6. Once again, we will get to hear how racist it was to move anybody with Japanese ancestry away from the Pacific Coast after Pearl Harbor. It all depends on your audience.

My grandparents and parents said it was the right thing to do at that time. So ask yourselves, who is right? People that were frightened that the Japanese were ready to invade the U.S., or somebody looking back 70 years after the fact?

You never hear about the 15,000 German and Italian citizens sent to the War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps. In December 1941, the Canadian government moved 22,000 and in January 1942 the Mexican government moved 5,000. The Mexican government moved the entire ethnic Japanese population living on that nation’s Pacific Coast. They were required to move themselves east (at least 200 miles inland and 100 miles south of the U.S. border), without assistance or compensation.

The Panama Canal Zone was especially worrisome for the U.S. Thousands of others were deported to the U.S. from Peru, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Those governments confiscated all of their properties and they were never compensated.