Virginia Mayor Goes There on Internment Camps and Syrian Refugee Crisis

Roanoke City Mayor David Bowers is standing by his statement Wednesday linking the resettling of Syrian refugees in the U.S. to controversial internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.

Local and state government leaders across the country have expressed concern about Syrian and Iraqi refugees coming into the country after the ISIS attack Friday in Paris that killed 129 people.

Bowers urged Roanoke Valley agencies and governments to suspend any Syrian refugee assistance.

He wrote, “I’m reminded that Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

The camps of the 1940s are largely seen as a dark moment in the U.S. battle with the Nazis and Japan. Paranoia led the federal government to contain more than 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans out of fear that they’d be loyal to Japan.

Bowers’ statement Wednesday drew a swift response from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Bowers was pulled from the campaign’s state organizational committee on Wednesday, according to Buzzfeed.

“The internment of people of Japanese descent is a dark cloud on our nation’s history and to suggest that it is anything but a horrible moment in our past is outrageous,” said Josh Schwerin, a Clinton campaign spokesman told Buzzfeed.

Bowers stood by his statement in an interview with The Roanoke Times on Wednesday, saying he is a student of Roosevelt.

“I understand how difficult a decision he made, but in the light of what was going on at the time he made the right decision,” Bowers told the paper. “And I think the right decision now is not to have Syrian refugees here, now.”