How the 1942 Japanese Exclusion Impacted U.S. Agriculture

In the early 1940s, Japanese American farmers represented a highly skilled segment of the agricultural workforce in the Western United States, characterized by higher education levels and more specialized farming expertise than U.S.-born farmers. During World War II, around 110,000 Japanese Americans (and 22,000 agricultural workers among them) were forcibly relocated from an “exclusion zone” along the West Coast to internment camps. Most never returned to farming. Using county-level panel data from historical agricultural censuses and a triple-difference (DDD) estimation approach we find that, by 1960, counties in the exclusion zone experienced 12% lower cumulative growth in assessed farm value for each percentage point reduction of their 1940 share of Japanese farm workers, relative to counties outside the exclusion zone. These counties also lagged in farm revenues, adoption of high-value crops, mechanization, and adoption of commercial fertilizer. We present suggestive evidence of broader negative spillovers to local economic growth beyond the agricultural sector. Taken together, our findings highlight the long-run economic costs of this policy, illustrating how the loss of skilled farmers can reduce agricultural growth and, in a time of fast technological adoption, may have negative effects on the whole regional development.