Mayor David Bowers Photo: City of Roanoke

ROANOKE, Va. — Mayor David Bowers made an inaccurate, offensive analogy to justify his call to humanitarian organizations not to resettle refugees in his city in Virginia. The mayor said rejecting Syrian newcomers would be as legitimate as placing Japanese nationals in internment camps during World War II. 

“I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

After the United States declared war on Japan in 1942, about 120,000 people of Japanese descent were confined to camps after they were deemed a threat to national security. In 1980, an investigation by a Congressional commission found that the internment of Japanese Americans was unnecessary and based on racial bias. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, apologizing for the internment. 

Japanese American actor George Takei criticized Bowers for missing “key points” of history.

“The internment (not a ‘sequester’) was not of Japanese ‘foreign nationals,’ but of Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens,” Takei wrote on Facebook. “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. It is my life’s mission to never let such a thing happen again in America.”