The reason I looked this topic up was because of two statements in Tammy Bruce’s book The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values. Brice states that:Delta Tank wrote: While all the interned Italians were citizens of Italy, about two-thirds of the interned Japanese were American citizens. The anti-Japanese measures lasted the length of the war, while the anti-Italian restrictions mostly ended after less than a year.
1] More Europeans were interned durring the war than Japanese.
2] This fact somehow then proves that the internment of Japanese was not motivated by racism, but by legitimate “national security” concerns.
I think that the figures boil down to something like this:
110,000 Japanese (2/3 of them citizens) interned.
+11,000 Germans (most of them foreign nationals) interned.
+ 1,600 Itallians (all of them foreign nationals) interned.
========
121,600 total internees
Thus 9.6% of the total were European, a figure of less than one-in-ten, much less “more than half.” At this point I would have to conclude:
1] The Japanese were victemized as much for their race as for the state of war.
2] Tammy Bruce is yet another right-wing flack trying to hide her imperialist agenda behind a false “America is never wrong” patriotism.