Bowers, however, is not alone in wanting to cut off assistance to refugees.
Advertisement
Bowers’ statement Wednesday drew a swift response from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
During the war, then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered about 120,000 Japanese-Americans to be removed from the United States’ West Coast and transferred to 10 massive internment camps on the basis of suspicion they might act as Axis spies.
Japanese internment is widely regarded as one of the largest civil-liberties violations ever perpetrated by the United States government.
The USA government apologized for the internment in 1988 under President Ronald Reagan and agreed to pay 60,000 still-living victims of the measure $20,000 each in reparations. Vice Mayor David Trinkle, who is running to replace Bowers, said the mayor’s opinion is not shared by other city leaders.
It’s unclear from the letter whether Bowers was aware that many USA citizens were among those forced into camps by the internment orders. I was one of them, and my family and I spent 4 years in prison camps because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. “We join the President and [Washington] Governor Inslee in calling for actions that reflect our nation’s ideals”. “We regret that we succumbed to fear”. More than two dozen governors moved to slam the doors to their states, while many mayors touted their desire to keep the doors open. “And I think the right decision now is not to have Syrian refugees here, now”.
“Our collective conscience has been shaken by both the refugee crisis resulting from the ongoing conflict in Syria and the terrorist attacks across the world”, the board said in a statement.
Bowers’ remarks were a far cry from those of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who told NPR that Washington welcomes Syrian refugees, also referring to Roosevelt’s decision to incarcerate his neighbors on Bainbridge Island.
Advertisement
Coy said the state’s role is to offer advice on where refugees be resettled in the state, and to offer services to the refugees once they’ve arrived. It helped fuel widespread discrimination of Japanese-Americans that lasted for years after the end of the war.
