How the 1942 Japanese Exclusion Impacted U.S. Agriculture

Japanese American farmers represented a significant share of agriculture-specific human capital on the U.S. West Coast in 1940. In 1942, the U.S. forcibly relocated them to internment camps, and most never returned to farming. Using a triple-difference design on county panel data, we find that by 1960, counties in the exclusion zone experienced 12 percent lower farmvalue growth per percentage point of Japanese farm workers excluded, relative to non-exclusion counties. Value per farm, high-value crop sales, mechanization, and farm wages also declined. The pattern is consistent with Japanese farmers representing hard-to-replace human capital, not replaceable labor.