Comprehension of Prisoners Without Trial

Comprehension of Prisoners without Trial Roger Daniels’ book Prisoners without Trial is another book that describes the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. This piece discusses about the background that led up to the internment, the internment itself, and what happened afterwards. The internment and relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II was an injustice prompted by political and racial motivations. The author’s purpose of this volume is to discuss the story in light of the redress and reparation legislation enacted in 1988. Even though Daniels gives first hand accounts of the internment of Japanese Americans in his book, the author is lacking adequate citations and provocative quotations. It’s unfortunate that Daniels does not provide the more substantive treatment he used in the volume he co-edited with Sandra Taylor, Japanese Americans, From Relocation to Redress. The history that led up to the internment was basically an anti-Oriental prejudice that began on the West Coast. When the Chinese immigrants started immigrating to the United States, they posed a social problem. “As the numbers of Chinese laborers increased, so did the strength of anti-Chinese sentiment among other workers in the American economy. This finally resulted in legislation that aimed to limit future immigration of Chinese workers to the United States, and threatened to sour diplomatic relations between the United States and China.”[1] As a result of this social problem, anti-Chinese prejudice movements began all over the United States and the government fixed this problem by barring the immigration of Chinese immigrants. This prejudice was basically transferred over to the Japanese and this prejudice was felt by many United States citizens, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Daniels notes that, in California, “in the early 1900’s most of the political parties, the Republicans, the Democrats, and the third party, the Populist, along with the