Title: Japanese internment camps during World War II are a lesson in the scary economics of racial resentment — Quartz
Headings: The dangerous economics of racial resentment during World War II
The dangerous economics of racial resentment during World War II
The economics of racial resentment
A new way of farming
Ripple effects

Content: By 1942, the year Roosevelt ordered their removal, Japanese Californians alone produced as much as 9% of the nation’s truck crops, according to US department of agriculture report to Congress (pdf). “It was, in part, the food production of Japanese America that made possible the dramatic growth of the West Coast population from 2.4 million in 1900 to 9.7 million in 1940,” writes Roger Daniels, a pioneering scholar of immigration, in Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850. “ Earnings from the shipments of their produce out of the region clearly made a significant contribution to regional economic growth.” In 1940, the average value of Japanese American-run farms was $280 per acre, according to the 1982 US government report. That compared with an average of $38 per acre for all farms. Dorthea Lange/Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
The Mochida family, which grew snapdragons and sweet peas on a two-acre site in Eden Township, awaits an evacuation bus. Identification tags are used to aid in keeping the family unit intact during the evacuation. Why were Japanese American farms so much more productive? Japanese Americans farmed differently from their (mostly) white fellow farmers: