Immigration Crises in America: Japanese Americans in 1942, US Southern Border in 2025

America once again has an immigration problem stoked by fear and political opportunism. This review revisits the Japanese American experience in the first half of the 20th century-not because the events are identical to the issues today but because the underlying dynamics are strikingly familiar: the rise of an Asian power perceived as a threat to U.S. global influence; the arrival of immigrants deemed "unassimilable" through racialized stereotypes; and the amplification of public anxiety by irresponsible politicians and media. In the case of the Japanese experience, the rule of law bent to popular will over 40 years to culminate in the mass incarceration of 110 000 Japanese in concentration camps in the American interior. It took another 40 years for Congress and the courts to return to constitutional principles and rectify the irreversible decisions that history would come to condemn.