Government Reparations Americans Made U.S Japanese Leave Apology

Many governments around the world have made "reparations" for things that the government has done wrong in the past. Reparations are usually made with money paid to the "victims," or people who were harmed, and by giving them a formal apology.

In the past 30 years in the U.S., the government has made reparations to several groups. One case of official U.S. government reparations occurred in 1988. In Word War II, Japanese Americans were put into internment camps and held prisoner because the U.S. government thought that they would be dangerous during the war. The U.S. government formally apologized to these Americans and passed a law that gave payments of $20,000 to each of the "survivors," or people still alive, who had been put into the camps. This was not the only reparation for this mistake. When Japanese Americans were moved into the camps, they had to leave behind most of what they owned, including their land. In 1968, the government began reparations for the property that Japanese Americans lost.

In the 1980's, Native Americans also began receiving reparations for being forced to leave their land more than 100 years before. In many cases, there were "treaties," or formal government agreements, that the government signed to get Native Americans to leave their land, but that they did not "honor," or follow. In many cases, reparations were decided by the terms of these old treaties. The reparations included large sums of money and the ownership of their own property to live and to work on.