Roger Daniels – författare

“Perhaps the most authoritative and readable single-volume history of immigration yet written.” —Daily Herald

Former professor Roger Daniels does his utmost to capture the history of immigration to America as accurately as possible in this definitive account of one of the most pressing and layered social issues of our time. With chapters that include statistics, maps, and charts to help us visualize the change taking place in the age of globalization, this is a fascinating read for both the student studying immigration patterns and the general reader who wishes to be more well-informed from a quantitative perspective. Daniels places more recent cases of migration in the Americas within the rich history of the continents pre-colonialism. This invaluable resource is filled with maps and charts designed to help the reader see patterns that surface when studying the movement of peoples over time.

“From almost every corner of the globe, in numbers great and small, America has drawn people whose contributions are as varied as their origins. Historians have spent much of the last generation investigating the separate pieces of that great story. Historian Roger Daniels has crafted a work that does justice to the whole.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Daniels has written a rich and provocative revisionist survey of American immigration history that should command a wide readership. In freshness, breadth of outlook, and readability, Coming to America surpasses its predecessors.” —Pacific Historical Review

“Provides the first comprehensive history of immigration to the United States in twenty years.” —Library Journal

After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt, claiming a never documented “military necessity,” ordered the removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II solely because of their ancestry. As Roger Daniels movingly describes, almost all reluctantly obeyed their government and went peacefully to the desolate camps provided for them.

Daniels, however, focuses on four Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans, who, aided by a handful of lawyers, defied the government and their own community leaders by challenging the constitutionality of the government’s orders. The 1942 convictions of three men—Min Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Fred Korematsu—who refused to go willingly were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944. But a woman, Mitsuye Endo, who obediently went to camp and then filed for a writ of habeas corpus, won her case. The Supreme Court subsequently ordered her release in 1944, following her two and a half years behind barbed wire.

Neither the cases nor the fate of law-abiding Japanese attracted much attention during the turmoil of global warfare; in the postwar decades they were all but forgotten. Daniels traces how, four decades after the war, in an America whose attitudes about race and justice were changing, the surviving Japanese Americans achieved a measure of political and legal justice. Congress created a commission to investigate the legitimacy of the wartime incarceration. It found no military necessity, but rather that the causes were “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” In 1982 it asked Congress to apologize and award $20,000 to each survivor. A bill providing that compensation was finally passed and signed into law in 1988.

There is no way to undo a Supreme Court decision, but teams of volunteer lawyers, overwhelmingly Sansei—third-generation Japanese Americans—used revelations in 1983 about the suppression of evidence by federal attorneys to persuade lower courts to overturn the convictions of Hirabayashi and Korematsu.

Daniels traces the continuing changes in attitudes since the 1980s about the wartime cases and offers a sobering account that resonates with present-day issues of national security and individual freedom.