There are internees still living; George Takei of Star Trek, for one.
Unfortunately, people want to do it again (to the scapegoat ethnic group of the day):
2016: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/trump-supporter-cites-internment-precedent-muslim-registry-n685131 (who was an actual appointed government official until recently: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-appointee-carl-higbie-resigns-after-racist-sexist-remarks-reported/article/2646399 )
It was always interesting to me that we interned Japanese Americans, but left German Americans pretty much alone.
I was fortunate enough to see George Takei’s musical “Allegiance” on Broadway, which deals with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The government alleged that we interned Japanese for their own protection, since they could be identified visually.
A bunch of BS, of course, since Chinese and other Asians were not interned.
The U.S. wasn’t at war with China. In fact, both the Chinese Nationalists and Mao’s group supported the Allies against the Imperial Japanese forces, so why would there be sanctions placed against Chinese in America? Also, there was much anti-Japanese sentiment among Chinese-Americans at that time. Read Jaime Ford’s ‘Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet,’ to learn a bit about Chinese-Japanese relations in Seattle during the war years (and prior). As for U.S. citizens of German descent (and Italian for that matter), a few were interned, but certainly they did not suffer like the Japanese did. Of course, as any Black old-timer from the South can tell you, the southern towns were German prisoners were held treated the German POWs a whole lot better than the local Black townsfolk.
By the way, subsequent to Pearl Harbor, signs appeared in Chinese communities all over the west coast, proclaiming their business establishments as “No Japs” or “We are Chinese!”
Ted Cruz’s father reportedly wanted to confine Secular Humanists–and maybe atheists–in camps in Vermont or Northern California.
It actually sounds kind of attractive to me. 
Not to make light of the Japanese experience, of course. 
Well, there was the little embarrassing (in this context) detail that Chinese immigration to the US and naturalization to US citizenship had been prohibited since 1882. That law was repealed in 1943, although only 105 per year were allowed to naturalize after that.
To anyone who has the opportunity, I’d recommend a visit to Manzanar in California’s eastern Sierra. The N P S has recreated some of this camp and there is interesting material in the museum.
I recently read an article in the LA Times about a course being taught at USC on the subject of the Japanese internment camps. Quite a number of the students interviewed for the article had no idea that this had even taken place. In Ca I think most school children read Farewell to Manzanar in elementary school but maybe this isn’t part F the curriculum in other areas of the country. @TatinG I’ve driven by Manzanar many times on trips to Mammoth but I’ve never stopped. It’s on my list of things I want to do.
Hyde Park (FDR;s home) had a very interesting exhibition about the internment which I saw last spring. It included excerpts from Pathe–is that the right word?–News; they are the newsreels that used to play before motion pictures. It assured everyone that these were not at all like concentration camps because the Japanese all moved to them voluntarily. Yeah, sure.
There were also oral interviews with many people who were teenagers in the camp. Those too were really interesting.
"Quite a number of the students interviewed for the article had no idea that this had even taken place. "
We’re very good at whitewashing our history in this country for K-12 audiences. It’s getting a bit better but there’s a long way to go towards the truth.
The point raised was the government’s flimsy pretext that Japanese-Americans might be subject to violence based on their appearance, but Chinese-Americans were just fine. That would obviously be a huge, gigantic assumption that the typical American at the time could distinguish between ethnic Japanese vs Chinese on appearances alone. But of course the pretext was just a pretext.
Definitely an incredibly shameful period in US history, but IMHO particularly shameful for the US Supreme Court which went along with it (Korematsu v. United States). Of course many people apparently disagree in principle, as shown by the various groups wanting to lock up various other groups. Lots of links posted on people wanting to lock up Muslims, but also various Christian leaders have voiced support for locking up members of the LGBT community as well.
Has anyone else seen the new PBS series We’ll Meet Again with Ann Curry. The first episode featured people who were children during WWII and included a Japanese American woman who was in an internment camp as a child. She was reunited with a friend who she had not seen since they were in elementary school.
http://www.pbs.org/video/children-of-wwii-wdudwr/
It was very touching.
The community I grew up in had a significant Japanese-American population. There was even a small town in the region that was virtually all Japanese [before the war], I am told. Yet, we non-Japanese students had never heard of the internment. It wasn’t until the night before the TV film “Farewell to Manzanar” aired that our science teacher, the toughest guy I had ever met up to that point, suspended the classroom lesson that day and spoke about the internment. I will never forget Mr. Okano’s words. He was not bitter but urged us to watch the show, understand, and learn from it. Later in high school I learned from Japanese friends that ALL of their families had been sent away. Sadly, few non-Japanese stood up for them, and many business owners and farm owners (of which there were plenty in the PNW) lost their properties to thieves. While there could have been some Nisei with sympathies for Imperial Japan (like in the Ni’Ihau Incident in Hawaii), the Supreme Court’s affirmation of President Roosevelt’s order was shameful.
Ann Curry’s new show is interesting. It seems that there were neighbors, classmates, etc. who spoke against the internment at the time. But I gather that for the most part the removal order was well supported by most other white folks. An interesting depiction of the days on the west coast immediately after the the war against Japan began is the Patty Duke film ‘If Tomorrow Comes,’ the story of ill-fated love between a Japanese-American man and a white woman in a California town.
Snow Falling on Cedars is another novel I would recommend where the storyline deals with Japanese-American internment and anti-Japanese sentiment.
Japanese are better at that. Ask any of its Asian neighbors. They are continuously arguing with Japan because Japan covers up or omits the war crimes in textbooks.
That Japan can be quite racist and dishonest in this respect does not mean that the US should not strive to be (a lot) better than that.