No One Ever Made the Case for Reparations Better Than Reagan

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

And it was under Conservative PM Mulroney that Canada also issued an official apology and payments for Japanese internment in Canada, along with the creation of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation:

Today, as Californians consider a reparations package that could reach $800 billion to pay for the harm the state has done to its African-American population on matters ranging from over-policing to housing discrimination, there’s a pro-reparations argument that needs to be revived. It’s that made by Ronald Reagan 35 years ago.

With California’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans getting ready to submit a draft of its report to the state legislature by late June, Reagan’s argument has become more relevant than ever. “For here we right a wrong,” Reagan declared in 1988, as his second term as president was nearing its end. Reagan spoke these words to mark his signing of a bill designed to provide restitution for the World War II internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

At a time when those making the case for reparations are accused of being woke, we forget the heartfelt case for payments combining restitution and reparations that Reagan made without fearing he would lose his credentials as a political conservative.

The decision to remove Japanese Americans from their homes during World War II reflected long standing anti-Asian prejudices. The Roosevelt administration contended that Japanese Americans posed a danger to the country in case of a Japanese attack on America’s West Coast. But there was no comparable treatment of German Americans or Italian Americans despite the United States also being at war with Germany and Italy.

Reagan’s speech is one that few want to recall because of the racism it calls attention to, but the speech is a lesson in how to deal with history we would like to have back. At the speech’s core lies Reagan’s belief that, while we cannot undo the wrongs of the past, we can mitigate their continuing impact.

In his address to the nation in 1988, Reagan managed to apologize for government wrongdoing and argue that his apology left America stronger. “So what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor,” Reagan declared. “We reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”

The timing of Reagan’s speech is noteworthy. It came decades before the Supreme Court in 2018 explicitly repudiated the Roosevelt-era Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision sanctioning the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. In words that echo Reagan’s, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. described Korematsu as “morally repugnant” and “gravely wrong the day it was decided.”

Prior to 2018 the strongest legal dissent from the Korematsu decision was the “confession of error” that the Justice Department issued in 2011 when it acknowledged the misleading role the Solicitor General had played in 1944 in defending the internment of Japanese Americans.

Reagan began his 1988 speech by describing the cruelty of the internment that the government was now seeking to redress. He spoke of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry being removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps solely because of their race.

The rush to internment began on February 19, 1942, 73 days after the United States entered World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Order 9066. The order came with so little planning that for a time Japanese-American families were interned in the horse stables at Santa Anita race track. In his address Reagan believed it was important not to sugarcoat the emotional and economic impact of internment.

The redress for Japanese Americans interned during World War II has meant tax-free payments of $20,000 to more than 82,000 claimants as a result of the 1988 act. The total amounts to over $1.6 billion.

Reagan was not put off by the cost of restitution, which in fact falls short of the amount of money lost by the men and women interned in the 1940s when put in current dollars. At the heart of Reagan’s speech was his belief that “no payment can make up for those lost years.”

Thirteen years after Ronald Reagan’s White House speech, the National Japanese-American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II opened in Washington on June 29, 2001. Unlike the memorials on the National Mall, the National Japanese-American Memorial does not immediately draw attention to itself. The memorial sits just north of the Capitol on a small triangle of land at the intersection of New Jersey Avenue and D Street.

The 33,000 square-foot park and plaza that hold the memorial invite contemplation. Designed by Washington, D.C. architect Davis Buckley, the memorial, like Reagan’s speech, makes a point of being direct and elegiac about the injustices it addresses. On one of its walls are the names of the 10 internment camps where Japanese Americans were held during World War II, and at the center of the memorial is a bronze sculpture, “The Golden Cranes,” by Nina Akamu, whose grandfather died in an internment camp. Her sculpture consists of two cranes struggling to break free of the barbed wire that entangles them.

“The burden of righting a historic wrong sanctioned by the government does not simply fall on those responsible for the wrong at the time it was committed.”

Ronald Reagan was not able to attend the opening of the Japanese-American Memorial, but he is present there. Words from his 1988 speech are inscribed on the edge of the memorial pool.

Reagan concluded his speech by recalling the time he attended a 1945 medal ceremony in Orange County, California, at which World War II General Joe Stillwell honored a Japanese-American military hero of the war in Europe with a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross. Reagan’s role at the 1945 medal ceremony, like that of the other celebrities there, was a minor one, but decades later, he saw his presence at the ceremony worth addressing.

In doing so, Reagan was not just personalizing his speech. He was making clear a lesson in continuity that is easy to forget: the burden of righting a historic wrong sanctioned by the government does not simply fall on those responsible for the wrong at the time it was committed. It falls on a state or nation owning up to its past.

Nicolaus Mills is author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America. He is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College.

Source: No One Ever Made the Case for Reparations Better Than Reagan

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

The Surprising Way Republicans Used to Use Immigration to Boost the Economy

2019/07/20 Leave a comment

Nice historical reminder. Never thought when Reagan was in power that he would be viewed as progressive a generation later:

There was a time when a Republican president formed immigration policy for its economic impact, rather than its rhetorical value as a campaign issue. In 1980, Ronald Reagan recognized soaring unemployment in Mexico as the driving force behind the increased flow of illegal immigrants into the United States. Then-candidate Reagan said he wanted to “make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, then while they’re working, and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they go back.”

While nobody would say Reagan, as president, solved the problem of illegal immigration—amnesty for 2.9 million illegals and increased employer responsibilities rubbed some the wrong way—his focus was on the needs of employers to find affordable labor, and the needs of immigrants to find jobs.

In fact, “there was a time in the 80s and 90s, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, when border patrol agents along the Texas border would regulate employment levels,” says Professor Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego. “The border agents would keep track of the labor needs of employers in the Rio Grande Valley. The higher the need for workers, the weaker the enforcement would be.”

Fast forward to last week’s testimony by Fed Chief Jerome Powell on Capitol Hill. Powell addressed the pressures on homebuilders, who are trying to continue building affordable homes. “You have a shortage of skilled labor,” Powell said, “so it’s hard to get people on the job—electricians, plumbers, carpenters and other people…just to get the people, no matter what you pay them, just finding people who can do that work.”

“Would you say our immigration policy has something to do with that?” asked Democratic Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota.

“That’s what we hear from home builders,” Powell replied.

Depressing the housing industry

“The lack of labor force is one of the main concerns for U.S. business,” says Selma Hepp, Chief Economist at Compass, an independent real estate brokerage. Hepp cites a survey from John Burns Consulting indicating that 82% of builders report a labor shortage. And since the housing industry contributes roughly 15% to the economy, that’s significant potential growth not being realized.

“The current level of single-family construction,” Hepp says, “while improving, it is still at about 50 percent below the levels of housing starts we had during the housing boom in early 2000s.”

The issue of illegal immigration is a touchy political topic, but let’s look at economic space that illegal immigrants fill. They tend to arrive when the U.S. economy is booming, provide low cost labor that is flexible enough to go where it’s needed, when it’s needed, and fill many jobs that Americans are not willing to do, especially in housing, food service, hospitality services, and agriculture. (Legal immigrants, on the other hand, many of them sponsored by companies or families, tend to be more highly educated, demand higher wages, and are not as flexible in moving to where the jobs are—partially because they may be legally obligated to a sponsoring employer.)

That potential increase in the labor force could come in handy right now, with an estimated 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 every day, and when there are more job openings than there are people looking for work.

Perhaps sensing that the full story was not being told last week, Republican Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana asked Powell, “What is the economic impact of illegal immigration on America’s economy?”

“I haven’t tried to quantify that, but people who come in legally or illegally, they add to our workforce,” Powell said, “and they contribute to GDP, certainly, so that’s part of it. You can really boil down growth into labor force growth and productivity increases, and immigration—total immigration—has contributed more than half of the growth in our workforce in the last few years.”

In fact, one of the ways that the economy could grow faster is if there were more workers, who are also tax payers and consumers, who supported other workers, who were also tax payers and consumers, and so on, and so on.

End to an unwritten policy

“But the shortage in the labor force isn’t just because of Trump’s policies,” says Professor Hanson. “That unwritten policy of border enforcement, following the ups and downs of the economy, ended with the border enforcement crackdown in 2005 under the George W. Bush administration.” Ironically, this was done by the former Texas governor to appease conservatives in Congress as a step toward comprehensive immigration reform. But reform never happened, even as tighter immigration policies continued, including under President Obama.

Then came the Great Recession, which took away the incentive for many foreign citizens to seek unfilled jobs in the United States. It was what Professor Hanson calls the end of the “Great Mexican Emigration.”

Kennedy clarified his focus for Powell: “What about illegal immigration? Does it have an impact on wages?”

“You know, there’s been a lot of research on that and it has really not reached a clear conclusion on that,” Powell said. “There is research that finds there is no visible impact, and there’s research that finds there’s a modest impact.”

Senator Kennedy was likely suggesting that illegal immigrants drive down the wages of Americans, which is a big part of the political argument Republicans have used against illegals coming into the country. And according to several sources, the argument is correct, especially when it comes to lower income, lower educated Americans who might find themselves competing with immigrants who are also looking for low-skilled work.

But the real drain on the economy from illegal immigrants comes when the resources they take from our economy exceed their contributions to it, which tends to happen, according to Professor Hanson, in the early years, just after they’ve arrived.

We’ll assume that the illegal immigrant worker IS paying certain taxes, including sales tax, property taxes (indirectly as renters), and possibly payroll taxes, under false social security numbers. But if a family comes into the U.S. illegally, sends their kids to publicly funded schools, and then has more children—who as natives are entitled to all American benefits such as Medicaid—will they be taking more from the economy than they are paying into it?

That’s the much-disputed question, politically as well as economically. Since illegal immigrants operate largely in the shadows, and are not eligible for most public benefits, a certain number is hard to determine, at least one that both parties will accept.

The problem for the administration is that with unemployment at 3.7%, it’s hard to say there’s a clear and direct impact being felt by many Americans economically. Most Americans who want a job, can find a job. That doesn’t take away the political argument, which will presumably still resonate—again, not without some validity—with a part of the voting public.

But as this expanding economy gets historically long in the tooth—the recession ended in June of 2009—a cooling housing industry may also put a chill on an economy that the president is hoping will carry him to reelection next year. That is surely not what he intended

Source: The Surprising Way Republicans Used to Use Immigration to Boost the Economy

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,