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: At the same time, a ban on Chinese immigration and the shift of white workers into manufacturing meant that the country needed more farmers to supply Americans with “truck crops” like strawberries, celery, and peppers. Dorthea Lange/Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
Farmers in San Leandro, CA, transplanting young tomato plants under canvas about 10 days prior to evacuation of residents of Japanese ancestry. Japanese immigrants filled the void. As historian Ronald Takaki details in his book, A Different Mirror, most had been farmers back in Japan, where they followed generations of ancestors in working small plots that required intensive labor. But in the US they also had limited job options, facing open discrimination from white people in industrial labor markets. 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.