February 19, 1942

Attorney-General Francis Biddle
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. Biddle:

I have been horrified by seeing, in the daily papers, statements that a wholesale movement of all aliens of Japanese, German, and Italian birth is contemplated for this area. It seems completely incompatible with the very fair and understanding statements coming from the attorney-general's office on the treatment of aliens and the necessity for the retention of civil rights in this emergency.

Among those 'enemy aliens', are many who have suffered intensely at the hands of the German and Italian fascists, who came here for refuge, and whose only desire is to become good citizens of this new land and help in the uprooting of fascism and fascistic tendencies everywhere.

I have taught Japanese-American children whose parents were passionately grateful for the educational opportunities, the chance to earn decent livings here in this country. If there are some Japanese aliens -- not aliens, you must remember, by their own choice, but because we deny them citizenship -- and some Japanese Americans who would help Japan, they are not many.

It should be possible to investigate, to separate those whose loyalty is unquestioned, from those who are sympathetic to the Axis powers. Or, at the very least, not to go in for such wholesale removals as the papers indicate. The problems created

by dumping strangers in great numbers in communities which do not, as a rule, want them and which are likely to take their resentment out on their unwanted guests, seem to me as serious as those implicit in allowing the aliens to remain in their homes and giving them necessary surveillance.

When I think of people, like the woman in San Francisco whose one son is dead at Pearl Harbor and whose other son is somewhere in the Pacific with the fleet, being classed as enemy aliens and uprooted from their familiar lives so ruthlessly, it makes me heartsick. There are many Japanese 'aliens' now in concentration camps or about to be taken from this area who have sons in the armed forces or this country -- even though they are denied the right to be officers because of their race -- yet who can suppose that they would be likely to do anything to jeopardize the cause for which their sons fight?

Helen Maude Harris
652 - East 73rd St.
Seattle, Wash.