VI. Federal Policymaking in the ASEAO Program

We already noted the issue of whether the five-year bar on an immigrant becoming a public charge would apply to ASEAO program participants. General federal immigration policy prohibited a resident alien from becoming a "public charge" within five years of admission to the U.S., on pain of revocation of their resident alien status and possible deportation. The rule was meant to dissuade immigrants from going on welfare after arriving in the country. SSB officials could have interpreted ASEAO benefits as violating the five-year bar, and this would have been a logical policy decision. After all, these were welfare benefits, and the five-year bar was meant to prevent new immigrants from receiving welfare benefits. Had SSB officials accepted matters on their face, they could have precluded the receipt of ASEAO benefits by any immigrant who had been in the U.S. for five years or less. But the SSB officials made an administrative finding that these persons were in this state of welfare dependency owing to the actions of the government rather than to any fault of their own. Thus, they reasoned, it would be an injustice to hold their circumstances against them, as would be the case under a strict interpretation of the five-year rule.

That SSB officials chose to deploy this rationale to avoid the five-year rule, based on their own sense of fairness of treatment for the displaced populations, speaks to the general policy orientation of the federal officials. If one can describe the entire relocation/detention/internment process as an "illiberal" public policy, then it would be fair to say of this decision, and others to be discussed, that SSB officials typically adopted a more "liberal" public policy when faced with a choice. In this context, a "liberal" public policy would be one that tended to lessen the impacts of the restrictive governmental actions, or to provide as generous a level of support to the affected populations as possible within the constraints of administrative discretion. In this sense, the documentation of the ASEAO program reveals repeated instances of SSB officials adopting liberal polices when faced with a choice, and not a single instance of doing the contrary.

Another interesting policy issue that arose during the internments was the eligibility of the interned aliens for unemployment benefits under the Social Security Act. The problem was that the law required a worker to be "available for work" as a condition to qualify for unemployment compensation under Social Security. The concept of unemployment insurance was that the unemployed person was not unemployed by choice or by an inability to work; in other words, the unemployed person had to be available for work, but out of work. Some state unemployment agencies, reading the law literally, if uncharitably, ruled that interned aliens were not available for work since they were interned, and hence, that the states did not have to pay them unemployment benefits. Since the SSB's Bureau of Employment Security formulated Federal policy for the state unemployment programs, the SSB was called upon to rule on the issue.

Obviously, the internees were unemployed not by choice but by factors well beyond their control. The SSB also observed that many of the interned aliens were in fact able to leave the internment centers on passes or leaves of various types and could therefore be available for work (both short and long-term passes were often granted). Some internees were still in the paid workforce even during internment. Typically, these internees would be granted "day passes" to leave the camp for nearby employment and would be expected to voluntarily return at the end of the work day. The fact that some internees were still in the paid workforce even during their internment, strengthened the case for those not working since it made their circumstance even more analogous to that of a typical laid-off worker. The fact that some internees were not permitted by camp authorities to leave the camps to take a job was not, in the SSB construal, the fault of these "unemployed" workers. ⁽¹⁾

The SSB thus ruled that interned aliens could not as a class be ruled ineligible for unemployment benefits, but that determinations had to be made on a case-by-case basis, as in all other unemployment claims. ⁽²⁾ So if interned aliens were ready, willing, and able to work, the fact that they were prevented from doing so by their incarceration would not make them ineligible for unemployment benefits. Only if they were incapable of working, or unwilling to work, would they be ruled ineligible. This was, in fact, the standard rule for unemployment benefits among the general population. The SSB's decision was thus to treat interned individuals under precisely the same policy that applied to ordinary Americans. As the Board's operating instructions to the states explained their rationale: "The Board feels that it can take no position with respect to the eligibility of Japanese evacuees for unemployment compensation benefits which differs in any way from that with respect to any other potential beneficiaries under State unemployment compensation laws." ⁽³⁾

Keep in mind that what was decided here was not the question of whether internees would be allowed to work, that was already the case. Indeed, many employers were anxious to have access to the internees as a source of relatively cheap labor. But what is being discussed here are unemployment insurance benefits, which means that the SSB was in principle authorizing non-working internees to receive state-administered unemployment insurance benefits while in internment. Unemployment insurance benefits are a net cost to the states and the payment of such benefits typically has a cost to the workers' former employers as well. To the extent that the public became aware of this issue, it would likely not be a politically popular decision.

So this decision reflected not politics, and not playing to popular wartime sentiments, but rather it was an expression of the primacy of the SSB's commitment to the social insurance ideals of the programs they administered. For this early generation of Social Security officials the struggle to which they were philosophically committed was the universalization of social insurance programs. They simply saw no logical reason--in terms of the logic of social insurance policy--for making an exception to the ideal of universalization even in this extraordinary instance.

Another example of a policy issue faced by the SSB, and decided in a liberal way, concerned whether aid to the family of an internee could be continued after the internee had died. The case presenting the issue was that of Mrs. Sam Toyoshima. Both Mrs. Toyoshima and her husband were American citizens, living in Los Angeles, where Mr. Toyoshima was a clerk in a market. When the relocation order took effect Mr. Toyoshima was taken into custody and placed in an internment center in Idaho, while his wife relocated outside the excluded area. The ASEAO program had begun providing assistance to Mrs. Toyoshima, and to her son, Sammy Tim, who was born seven months after Mr. Toyoshima was interned. Three months after Sammy Tim was born, his father died, of pneumonia contracted in the camp. Moreover, Mrs. Toyoshima's health was affected by the birth and she developed both a cardiac and a kidney problem requiring significant ongoing medical care. Since one of the main purposes of the ASEAO program was to provide economic security for the family of an internee in his absence as a breadwinner, the somewhat paradoxical problem presented itself of whether such aid could be continued in the case of his permanent absence. In other words, if there was no internee, could there be ASEAO benefits for the family of an internee? Mary Austin, after discussing the matter with Jane Hoey, directed her Regional Representative in California to continue providing for the needs of the widow and the child on a month-to-month basis until some permanent form of social provision could be arranged. ⁽⁴⁾

A decision with a considerably larger potential impact involved foreign internees and their eligibility for U.S. aid. A number of South and Central American countries had been engaged in their own internment programs since the outbreak of the war, and in July 1943 the U.S. Government agreed to accept custody of more than 2,200 such foreign internees. The Department of Justice then undertook detailed loyalty investigations of each of these individuals. Justice decided that those who passed these loyalty reviews would be allowed to take up residence in the U.S. By August 1943 Justice had completed its review of the internees from Panama and the Canal Zone and was preparing to release them from custody. The Department wrote to the Bureau of Public Assistance inquiring as to whether the SSB would extend relocation assistance under the ASEAO program to these released internees.

It would have been quite easy to deny relocation assistance to the foreign internees. Public sentiment would almost certainly have applauded doing so. In effect, the SSB was being asked to provide welfare benefits for enemy aliens from other nations. Welfare for foreign enemy aliens? Can any idea be more ready-made for demagoguery? But, after getting the General Counsel's clearance, Jane Hoey sent the SSB a policy recommendation indicating she intended to provide such support, unless the Board overruled her. ⁽⁵⁾ The Board concurred with Hoey's decision. ⁽⁶⁾

Probably the most dramatic example of the SSB's insistence on "liberal" policymaking in the ASEAO program concerned a serious conflict with several California counties over the eligibility of resettled internees for assistance through the county welfare systems.

After the war, most of America accepted the returning Japanese with good grace, but there was still some resistance to their resettlement in local communities. This resistance was especially marked in certain parts of California. The ASEAO program was conceived as a temporary program to provide assistance for needs specifically connected to the impact of the removals, internments and resettlements. After the resettlements were completed, families in need would then be the ongoing responsibility of existing state and local welfare programs.

In California the standard welfare programs were county-based (with 51 separate counties) and it turned out that four counties (Tulare, San Joaquin, San Benito and Imperial) were refusing to take needy Japanese families onto the welfare rolls and were interpreting the various federal and state rules in such a way as to justify their intransigence. By this time in late 1945, the relocation centers had all been closed and the ASEAO program was only supposed to be expending funds for purposes of resettling internees in local communities. Once a person or a family had been resettled, ongoing welfare assistance became the responsibility of the various state and local agencies. However, in late November 1945, the Director of the California Department of Social Welfare, Charles M. Wollenberg, wrote the BPA in desperation, trying to see if ASEAO funds could in some way be used to aid the needy in the recalcitrant counties. The problem was that needy Japanese families who had been resettled in these four California counties were being denied welfare assistance by county officials. Technically, the ASEAO program could not provide such assistance--ongoing benefits for resettled families were clearly state and local matters. BPA Regional Representative, Azile Aaron, however, wrote back a most revealing letter:

we are in agreement that for those Japanese returning to their county of residence, it is expected that financial assistance and other services, including medical care, will be available to them on the same basis as other residents of the community. . . . Moreover, our policy from the beginning of the program has been that if immediate financial assistance is needed pending receipt of categorical assistance and if general assistance is not immediately available, resettlement assistance should be used during this interim period to prevent suffering. . . .

As I mentioned in our discussion of the Tulare situation that even though the cases in question may be eligible for county general relief, the persons involved have to eat pending the receipt of such aid; and until such time as they receive general relief they would be eligible for resettlement assistance. We understand that the situation in some cases has reached the point of actual suffering in this county. Further, considerable evidence is being accumulated of instances of dire need and actual suffering existing in the other counties mentioned above. We are sure you will agree that with funds available such cases of suffering need not and should not exist. Resettlement assistance, like other programs furnished by public funds, should be available to all persons who are in need of assistance and/or services provided for this group and who are eligible. As you will recall, making such assistance and services available to all persons eligible under the standards prescribed by the Social Security Board is one of the provisions of our agreement. ⁽⁷⁾

Here again we see a hallmark of the ASEAO program. While welfare officials in some California counties were searching for ways to interpret the rules so as to avoid helping the Japanese, federal officials were determined to find ways to interpret the rules to benefit them.

There are lots of small administrative conundrums that arise in the course of a program like ASEAO. There is always the option of interpreting the rules restrictively or expansively. Consider a case involving the deportees--those individuals whom the INS had decided to deport back to their homelands (around 8,000 Japanese were repatriated to Japan after the war). Even at the end of the war, when the formerly interned were being resettled, these individuals who were being deported were still shunned by many Americans. The desire to be repatriated sometimes even broke families apart, producing some unexpected complications for the ASEAO program.

In December 1945, Charles Wollenberg again wrote to Azile Aaron, this time propounding the case of Mrs. Matsui and her children. The Matsuis had been evacuated to the Tule Lake camp where they were interned as a family during the war. Mr. Matsui was being repatriated to Japan, but his wife and children refused to go. The Matsuis got divorced and Mrs. Matsui and the children were released from the Tule Lake camp, but Mr. Matsui remained interned awaiting deportation to Japan. Since she was divorced, Mrs. Matsui could be viewed as no longer having a connection to a valid internee, and hence, as ineligible for aid. So the question was whether the state could provide support to Mrs. Matsui and her children under these circumstances. The BPA representative replied:

Any Japanese affected by the exclusion orders were subject to Government restrictive action and, therefore, would be eligible to assistance from the Enemy Aliens and Others program, if in need. You inquire whether members of Japanese deportees' families would be eligible for assistance from this program. Inasmuch as the members of the families had likewise been affected by restrictive action they would be eligible under the program even though they had not actually received any assistance under the program prior to the deportation of the family head. . . . The divorce action should not be considered a factor in determining the eligibility of Mrs. Matsui and the children. Inasmuch as they had been evacuated under Governmental orders they would be eligible for assistance on the same basis as any other evacuee who had returned and needs financial assistance. ⁽⁸⁾

This is of course a straightforward and reasonable policy interpretation. But needless to say, reasonable policies could easily have been side-stepped in such cases if that were the attitude of the government officials administering the ASEAO program.

The general rule for benefit payments under the ASEAO program was to pay the same rates that were paid under existing welfare programs in the locality. For the most part, state and local welfare workers were allowed flexibility to set actual payment amounts based on their assessment of needs and the prevailing standards in the community. In a few instances the federal policymakers did offer either guidelines or explicit payment schedules. For example, the BPA instructed state and local officials that they could pay up to $3 per day for subsistence costs for persons in the process of moving to a new location. Expenditures for household goods actually had a set of mandated federal standards based on family size. ⁽⁹⁾

Another example of generous federal policymaking is the flexible way that BPA permitted the states and localities to use even the fixed schedules for household goods. For example, Ichiro Odagawa was resettled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in early 1944 and in December he was able to bring his wife and two small children from the relocation center to join him in Philadelphia. In order to set up his household Mr. Odagawa had borrowed $312.05 to purchase furniture and other household goods. This amount was in excess of the allowed $200 for household goods for a family of four. But as the caseworker's report to BPA officials candidly admitted, "We decided to help the family since Mr. Odagawa had borrowed the money to purchase furniture, thinking that since we do give financial aid for this purpose, we would reimburse him. Also, because the family income is not sufficient to pay current living expenses, and also a large debt of this kind." So the caseworker took the standard price list of items on which benefits were computed and inflated several of the items by an arbitrary $8 each "to allow for the increase in prices," and was thereby able to reimburse Mr. Odagawa $268.40 toward his debt. ⁽¹⁰⁾ BPA officials accepted this report without apparent complaint.

Of course these are very modest amounts of money, but these types of fine-shaving of tiny kernels of economic support are what happen every day in welfare programs. And there is always the opportunity to soften the corners in favor of the recipient, or to adhere strictly to the rules. That there is evidence in the case files of instances of shaving the rules to benefit the clients, again indicates a basic orientation of liberal administration in the ASEAO program.

Then, too, there is the mere fact of it. Consider what the ASEAO program meant in the context in which it arose. The nation had decided, in the throes of wartime hysteria, to identify about 150,000 of its residents as "enemy aliens" who, for the protection of the nation, had to be evicted from their homes, and most of whom were interned in prison camps. Given this, is it not a matter of some remarkable significance that in the midst of this massive police action, that other officials of that same government were hard at work trying to ameliorate in some small measure some of the purely economic hardships created by the government's policy?

If the ASEAO program had not existed it is virtually certain that many of these needy individuals would not have been provided aid by state and local officials or by private charities. ⁽¹¹⁾ The circumstances in which aliens of enemy nationality and their families found themselves in early 1942 was perilous on many fronts, including the treats to their economic security. In most of these families, there was no one who qualified for the benefits provided under the Social Security Act. This meant the internees were dependent upon the vagaries of state aid. In California, obstacles were immediately raised to the receipt of state aid. In the first place, California had a state citizenship requirement for old-age assistance, and other forms of benefits were under the jurisdiction of county welfare officials, many of whom simply imposed unilateral rules prohibiting any benefits or relief to enemy aliens. Private charitable agencies attempted some assistance, but were quickly overwhelmed and basically gave up. ⁽¹²⁾ The bottom-line is that without the federal ASEAO program, there would have been little or no financial assistance for many of these victims of the "restrictive governmental actions."

1. "Guide for State Employment Security Administration," SSB procedural manual, Part II, Vol. 1, Section. 7810, issued March 1943.

2. Memorandum from John J. Corson, Director of Employment Security, SSB, To: All State Employment Security Agencies, dated March 16, 1943. Copy in National Archives, BPA Master File of Civilian War Assistance to Enemy Aliens, 1940-1948, Box 6.

3. "Guide for State Employment Security Administration," SSB procedural manual, Part II, Vol. 1, Section. 7810, issued March 1943.

4. Memorandum from Martha E. Phillips, Regional Representative, BPA, to Mary E. Austin, Chief, Field Division, BPA, dated December 10, 1942. And memorandum from Mary Austin to Martha Phillips in reply, dated December 14, 1942. National Archives II, records of the Bureau of Public Assistance- State Files of Civilian War Assistance to Enemy Aliens, 1940-1948, box 16.

5. Memorandum from Jane Hoey, Director, Bureau of Public Assistance, to Oscar Powell, Executive Director, SSB, dated August 4, 1943. National Archives II, records of the Bureau of Public Assistance- State Files of Civilian War Assistance to Enemy Aliens, 1940-1948, box 16.

6. Board Minutes of August 10, 1943, "EAO Program- Inclusion in Scope of Program of Aliens from Central and South America Now in Custody of the U.S.," SSA History Archives.

7. Letter from Azile H. Aaron, Public Assistance Representative to Mr. Charles M. Wollenberg, Director, Department of Social Welfare, Sacramento, California, dated November 28, 1945. National Archives II, records of the Bureau of Public Assistance- State Files of Civilian War Assistance to Enemy Aliens, 1940-1948, box 3.

8. Letter from Azile H. Aaron, Public Assistance Representative to Mr. Charles M. Wollenberg, Director, Department of Social Welfare, Sacramento, California, dated December 20, 1945. National Archives II, records of the Bureau of Public Assistance- State Files of Civilian War Assistance to Enemy Aliens, 1940-1948, box 3.

9. Manual of Standards and Practices and Operating Procedures, Social Security Board, March 5, 1945 edition, 34, 41.

10. "Summary of the Case of ODAGAWA, Ichiro H. and Margory," undated, National Archives II, records of the Bureau of Public Assistance- Master File of Civilian War Assistance to Enemy Aliens, 1940-1948, box 14.

11. Leahy, 1945: 27.

12. Ibid.