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The numbers of new arrivals peaked in 1907 with as many as 30,000 Japanese immigrants counted (economic and living conditions were particularly bad in Japan at this point as a result of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5). [6]: 25 Japanese immigrants who moved to mainland U.S. settled on the West Coast primarily in California. [5]
Japanese immigrants were primarily farmers facing economic upheaval during the Meiji Restoration; they began to migrate in large numbers to the continental United States (having already been migrating to Hawaii since 1885) in the 1890s, after the Chinese exclusion (see below). [20] By 1924, 180,000 Japanese immigrants had gone to the mainland.
Following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants were increasingly sought by industrialists to replace the Chinese immigrants.However, as the number of Japanese in the United States increased, resentment against their success in the farming industry and fears of a "yellow peril" grew into an anti-Japanese movement similar to that faced by earlier Chinese immigrants. [1]
Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which led the US government to force more than 100K people of Japanese descent into detention camps.
Japanese Americans have been returning to their ancestorial homeland for years as a form of return migration. [1] With a history of being racially discriminated against, the anti-immigration actions the United States government forced onto Japan, and the eventual internment of Japanese Americans (immigrants and citizens alike), return migration was often seen as a better alternative.
During World War II, over 2,200 Japanese from Latin America were held in concentration camps run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, part of the Department of Justice. Beginning in 1942, Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and transported to American concentration camps run by the INS and the U.S. Justice Department.
Colonial-era immigrants often repaid the cost of transoceanic transportation by becoming indentured servants in which the new employer paid the ship's captain. In the late 19th century, immigration from China and Japan was restricted. In the 1920s, restrictive immigration quotas were imposed but political refugees had special status.
In the decade of 1901 to 1910, 129,000 Japanese immigrated to the continental United States or Hawaii; nearly all were males and on five-year work contracts and 117,000 more came in the decades from 1911 to 1930. How many of them stayed and how many returned at the end of their contracts is unknown but it is estimated that about one-half returned.