David A. Taylor – smithsonian.com – February 2, 2017: “The executive order that forced Japanese-Americans from their homes also put immigrants from Italy under the watchful eye of the government…The incarceration of Japanese-Americans is the best-known effect of Executive Order 9066, the rule signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. And for good reason. The suffering and punishment placed upon innocent Japanese-Americans was a dark chapter in American history. But the full extent of the government order is largely unknown.In addition to forcibly evacuating 120,000 Americans of Japanese background from their homes on the West Coast to barbed-wire-encircled camps, EO 9066 called for the compulsory relocation of more than 10,000 Italian-Americans and restricted the movements of more than 600,000 Italian-Americans nationwide. Now, the order has resurfaced in the public conversation about immigration.  Says Tom Guglielmo, a history professor at George Washington University: “It’s as relevant as ever, sadly.” Italian-Americans had faced prejudice for decades by the time the order was drafted, says Guglielmo. Italians were the biggest group of immigrants to the United States who passed through Ellis Island for much of the late 19th and early 20th century; between 1876 and 1930, 5 million Italians moved to the U.S. Not without backlash: By the 1920s, pseudo-scientists and polemicists in the 1920s popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race from Anglo-Americans…[For those who attempted to immigrate to America from Italy during the war years of the 1940s – and who were also Jewish – the obstacles increased exponentially.]

• US Department of Justice Report to the Congress of the United States – A Review of the Restrictions on Persons of Italian Ancestry During World War II – November 2001.
• See also tonight’s related posting – 9th Circuit refuses to reinstate travel ban