In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the authority of the U.S. government to order the internment of a minority group in the interest of national security, even though there was no evidence that any members of this group were disloyal to the United States. This paper discusses whether the same policy should be applied today against U.S. Muslims or Muslim immigrants and why or why not?
It is essential to clarify some of the things that were mentioned in the question. The minority group was Japanese Americans and people of Japanese ancestry (Komisarchik et al., 2020). The main reason for such an action was the outbreak of hostilities between the US military forces and those of the Japanese Empire. It is also important to note that this does neither condone nor forgive an entire minority group’s internment. Nowadays, the United States is at war with only one Muslim country, namely Afghanistan. The question arises whether this gives the US government the right to put the US Muslims and Muslim immigrants in the internment camps.
The answer is no for several reasons. The internment is based on discrimination and stereotyping. Moreover, it antagonizes the state in the eyes of people who have undergone internment and alienates them from politics (Komisarchik et al., 2020). The internment camps for US Muslims and Muslim immigrants would also trigger a wave of terrorist attacks. The pragmatic reason is that if the state launches internment camps, the United States will lose powerful allies in the Middle East.
Despite the fact that both scientific and informal polls may become subjects to some error, it is the scientific one that has an academic nature and therefore is objective. The scientific nature implies such things as sampling techniques, question creation, and analytical methodology. Interestingly, “polling errors have most commonly resulted from problems with representative samples and weighting, undecided voters breaking in one direction, and to a lesser extent late swings and turnout models” (Prosser & Mellon, 2018, p. 757). An informal poll can be developed without any criteria, while for a scientific one, they are necessary.
References
Komisarchik, M., Sen, M., & Velez, Y. (2020). The political consequences of ethnically targeted incarceration: Evidence from Japanese-American internment during WWII. 1-65. Web.
Prosser, C., & Mellon, J. (2018). The twilight of the polls? A review of trends in polling accuracy and the causes of polling misses. Government and Opposition, 53(4), 757-790. Web.