New York City is a kind of archipelago, a Philippines
on the Hudson River. Only one borough – the Bronx
– is actually attached to the American mainland.
There are some forty islands in the city beyond Manhattan,
Staten Island and Long Island. These minor islands are
nestled in the bays, rivers, harbor, and other waterways
that encase the city.
Many of the city’s islands once served important
social functions and some still do. As the city grew
in population northward up the island of Manhattan,
along with it came the pesky social problems that tend
to afflict any budding metropolis. Under such circumstances,
these islands became “cordon sanitaires”
in the words of writer Phillip
Lopate, “where the criminal, the insane,
the syphilitic, the tubercular, the orphaned, the destitute
. . . were quarantined.”
The most famous of these small islands is Ellis Island,
originally little more than a three-acre bank of sand
and mud that barely kept its head above high tide. By
1891, it would become the site of the federal government’s
new immigration inspection station. Immigration inspection
had become recently federalized, taking the power away
from state governments.
Americans had recently become concerned with the “quality”
of immigrants arriving in the country. This coincided
with a dramatic shift in immigration away from Northern
and Western Europeans toward Southern and Eastern Europeans.
“Lunatics and Idiots Shipped from Europe”
and “The World’s Dumping Ground,”
screamed newspaper headlines. Alabama Congressman William
C. Oates summed up the growing belief in the undesirability
of new immigrants:
A house to house visit to Mulberry Street [the city’s
burgeoning Little Italy], in New York, will satisfy
any one that there are thousand of people in this
country who should never have been allowed to land
here. . . . Many of the Russian Jews who inhabit other
streets in New York, and other cities are of no better
class than the Italians just referred to.
The 1891 Immigration Act would set the course of American
immigration policy for the next thirty years. It expanded
the types of “undesirable” immigrants, so
that Ellis Island officials would be on the lookout for
“idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely
to become public charges, persons suffering from a loathsome
or a dangerous disease, persons who have been convicted
of a felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanor involving
moral turpitude, polygamists. . .” In the coming
decades, the list would grow longer.
The system of immigration inspection and regulation at
Ellis Island was designed to provide the nation with a
“proper sieve” that would separate “desirable”
from “undesirable” immigrants. This was a
bit of a compromise, a middle ground position between
those who upheld the laissez-faire notion that the country
should be open to all immigrants (at least white European
ones) and those who argued for tighter restrictions.
The sifting process at Ellis Island, improved throughout
the years, meant strict scrutiny of new arrivals. Inspectors
and doctors were looking for physical problems such as
poor eyesight, bad backs, trachoma, or other potentially
contagious diseases. Inspectors kept an eye open for suspected
prostitutes, anarchists, and those “likely to become
a public charge.” To enforce the nation’s
expanding immigration laws, a fairly sophisticated bureaucratic
system was created at Ellis Island to interpret and execute
those laws.
Roughly twenty percent of immigrants passing through Ellis
Island were set aside for further inspection, while the
rest passed through Ellis Island without incident. Yet
overall, only about two percent of immigrants were excluded
from entering the country and sent back to Europe. Part
of the reason for such a low figure was that steamship
companies had an economic incentive not to bring immigrants
who might run afoul of immigration laws, since the steamships
were forced to pay the costs of returning these rejected
migrants back to Europe. In 1905 alone, it was estimated
that steamship companies at Bremen had refused to sell
tickets to some 8,000 potential Americans.
Ellis Island’s connection with New York City was
natural. Some three-quarters of all immigrants to America
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came
through the Port of New York, and many of them ended up
staying in the city’s crowded tenement districts.
Such conditions provided fodder for immigration restrictionists
such as Ellis Island Commissioner William Williams. Immigrants
from Southern and Eastern Europe, Williams wrote in one
of his annual reports, “have very low standards
of living, possess filthy habits, and are of an ignorance
which passes belief. Types of the classes referred to
representing various alien races and nationalities may
be observed in some of the tenement districts of Elizabeth,
Orchard, Rivington, and East Houston Streets.”
Yet those same New York neighborhoods also produced numerous
immigrant aid associations designed to help immigrants
with their transition into their new homeland. In addition,
these organizations provided help in challenging restrictive
interpretations of the law at Ellis Island, as well as
decisions to exclude individual immigrants.
One New Yorker best embodied the conflicting attitude
toward immigrants: the patrician Theodore Roosevelt. Early
in his public career, Roosevelt complained about the “evil
effects of unrestricted immigration” and supported
a literacy test for newcomers. One of his closest friends,
Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, was the nation’s
leading restrictionist. Yet because of his New York City
roots, Roosevelt kept in steady contact with the city’s
ethnic and religious leaders, always solicitous of their
opinions. As President, Roosevelt’s motto on the
subject was: “We can not have too much immigration
of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the
wrong kind.”
Eventually, the regulation of immigration at stations
like Ellis Island gave way to stricter measures. The quotas
of the 1920s not only severely restricted immigration
both in number, especially for those from Southern and
Eastern Europe, but it also moved the primary responsibility
for immigration inspection to American consulates abroad.
Ellis Island found its role in processing immigrants gradually
lessened. Increasingly, it served as a detention center,
housing suspected Nazi and fascist sympathizers during
World War II and suspected Communists and other radicals
awaiting deportation in the early Cold War years. By 1954,
an increasingly irrelevant Ellis Island closed its doors.
The decline and abandonment of Ellis Island paralleled
the post-war prosperity that led many second and third-generation
Americans to shed much of their ethnic baggage as they
assimilated into society, rose into the middle class,
and moved to the suburbs. Thanks to quota restrictions,
immigration was at historic lows. By 1960, only 5.4 percent
of Americans were foreign-born. The deterioration and
neglect of Ellis Island in the 1960s and 1970s also mirrored
the declining fortunes of New York City and other urban
centers as the process of suburbanization continued to
drain the city of people and resources.
Immigration is once again a hot button issue and New York
City has re-emerged as a major immigrant center. Nearly
forty percent of city residents are foreign-born. Today’s
immigrants do not have an Ellis Island experience, but
instead enter the country through airports and across
the nation’s land borders. Yet Americans are still
confronting issues such as how many immigrants we should
receive and what kinds of restrictions, if any, there
should be.
Ellis Island still looms in the American imagination.
The once-dreary bureaucratic outpost has been transformed
into a popular tourist attraction and replaced Plymouth
Rock in the American iconography as the site of the nation’s
mythic founding. It has been estimated that some forty
percent of Americans have at least one ancestor who passed
through Ellis Island.
But even the rehabilitation of Ellis Island has not been
without controversy. Some worry that the idea of America
as a “nation of immigrants,” embodied by the
rebirth of Ellis Island and its newfound role as a national
shrine, leaves out Americans who did not come to America
voluntarily or who were already here before European settlement.
Other critics of the “shrinification” of Ellis
Island worry that the celebration of Ellis Island and
those immigrants who passed through it can end up glorifying
older immigrants and unfairly comparing them to newer
immigrants.
Take the case of eighty-three-year-old Sophie Wolf, who
had come to America from Germany in 1923. On a 1980 visit
to Ellis Island, she told a reporter: “We should
not let anyone in. When we came, the rules were you could
not be a burden to the state. There were no schools where
you could learn the language. . . .” Clearly for
Wolf and others, the new immigrants of the 1980s and beyond
were inferior to those of her day. They believed that
modern immigrants were treated more leniently and received
more help from the government.
At first glance, Wolf seems to validate some of the concerns
with the shrinification of Ellis Island. Yet when she
continued with her thoughts about Mexican, Vietnamese,
and Cuban immigrants, she seemed to shift her views. “But
you’ve got to give people a chance,” she said.
“You can’t send them back.”1 Her dual
response nicely captures a nuanced version of Ellis Island
memory.
As America deals with the challenges of our latest wave
of mass immigration, it will do so without Ellis Island,
the immigrant processing center. But Ellis Island as myth,
as a memory place, still has an important hold on the
American imagination, and future generations will grapple
with both its historical meaning and its relevance to
contemporary, multicultural America.
1 Time, December 15, 1980.
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