The 1948 compensation act paid far below actual losses by design.
Evidence
After the war, the federal government passed several pieces of legislation to try to atone for this shameful history. The most important was the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act in 1948. Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Truman, it awarded people of Japanese ancestry the right to be compensated for real and personal property losses as a result of their exclusion and evacuation during the war. However, the act did not permit claims for loss of income or pain and suffering. Roughly $37 million was paid out, far below the actual losses. The awards were intentionally low because the requirement of proof was so onerous that claimants were incentivized to settle quickly for lower amounts. In the end, the Evacuation Claims Act did not come close to fairly compensating survivors and their families for the badge of racial inferiority that had been stamped upon them by the federal government. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 186
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: The onerous-proof mechanism is a concrete example of how a putatively remedial law structurally undercompensates — a design feature, not a flaw.