When people today refer to Ellis Island, they generally invoke its legacy in the national saga of immigration to America, standing with the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor as a beacon of opportunity for the world’s dispossessed. However, the building of a federal facility at the site of an old naval arsenal on Ellis Island in 1892 grew out of the newly established federal authority to regulate and restrict immigration.
Before federal processing was institutionalized at Ellis Island, states had the right to set the criteria for the suitability of immigrants, with an interest in recruiting labor and excluding potential wards of the state. Two-thirds of the migrants to the United States between 1786 and 1892 came through New York City, and after 1855 immigration processing, including medical exams, customs inspection, and name registration, took place at Castle Garden in lower Manhattan, where social reformers set up voluntary services to help immigrants find work and housing. Similar immigration stations were located in Boston, Baltimore, and Galveston.
With the emergence of a national economy and a national transportation system in the years following the Civil War (1861-1865), immigration fell increasingly under federal scrutiny, and the federal government passed laws to restrict the entry of immigrants thought to be undesirable. Early efforts restricted the entry of prostitutes, convicts, incapacitated people, and contract labor. The most important exception to general practices of open immigration was Chinese exclusion, codified in federal law as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, establishing the prerogative of the federal government to raise restrictive barriers against specific national groups and to mark them as permanently foreign, aliens without rights. Between 1880 and 1900, the pace of immigration to the United States increased dramatically, with nine million immigrants arriving in these years. Laborers from England, Ireland, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries were now joined by new arrivals from Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Canada, Greece, Syria, the West Indies,Mexico, and Japan. Nativist concerns about the new immigrants led to escalating pressures for a federal immigration policy.
The new federal immigration station that opened in 1892 on Ellis Island was a key component of the new federal immigration policy, which set standards for minimum health and competency, regulated the process of inspection and deportation for overseas immigration, and delegated enforcement to a superintendent of immigration and an Office of Immigration, located within the Department of the Treasury, later Commerce, and then Labor, until 1940, when the Immigration Service was transferred to the Department of Justice. Ellis Island was the entry point for twelve million people, about three-fourths of the migrants who entered the United States between 1892 and 1924. On its busiest day, April 17, 1907, Ellis Island officials processed 11,747 immigrants. Other federal immigrant processing stations were established at Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.
Many European immigrant accounts of their experience at Ellis Island emphasized the hopefulness of arrival and the often confusing and sometimes frightening aspects of inspection. Steerage passengers entering New York Harbor boarded ferries for Ellis Island (American-born passengers and those travelling first and second class were examined on board ship). After being tagged with their number from the ship’s official listing, immigrants walked into the baggage room where they were encouraged to check their belongings. Then they moved up the steps to the second-floor registry room in the Great Hall, where they were evaluated by medical inspectors looking for contagious diseases and physical disabilities, and by legal inspectors checking that names, birthplaces, ages, and occupations matched ship registries and ascertaining that immigrants were not likely to become wards of the state. Stories from prior travelers helped immigrants rehearse answers for the inspectors, and provided strategies for passing through successfully, for example, discretely passing the same twenty-five dollars from immigrant to immigrant to preempt the requirement for proving self-support. A literacy test for immigrants over fourteen was administered after 1917.
The shipping lines had to bear the cost of returning "excluded aliens" to their point of departure. Most newcomers, 80 percent or more, passed through the process successfully; detention for the remaining 20 percent, for legal or medical reasons, lasted in most cases less than two weeks. Although most of the patients held in medical detention recovered and were able to complete the immigration process, between 1900 and 1954, over 3,500 people, including 1,400 children, died on Ellis Island. Historians have calculated that despite a growing number of excludable categories, only about 2 percent of Ellis Island migrants failed to gain entry. In comparison, Chinese immigrants trying to gain entry through Angel Island by making use of the very few exceptions provided by the Chinese exclusion laws faced much more rigorous interrogation and isolation, and much lengthier detentions.
Ellis Island’s functions changed dramatically with the passage of immigration restriction in the 1920s, ending the era of open European immigration. Combined pressures for exclusion proposed by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant restrictionist groups, reinforced by theories of scientific racism spurred by World War I (1914-1918) rhetoric of "100 percent Americanism," the Red Scare’s linking of foreigners with radicalism, and the labor movement’s fears of rising unemployment, resulted in the passage of the Quota Act in 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924. The Quota Act limited the total number of immigrants who could enter the United States and required that immigrants bring passports. The Johnson-Reed Act did not limit immigration from the Western Hemisphere, but it reduced the total number of entering immigrants, and most significantly, established national-origins quotas to favor northern and western European immigrants, who received 82 percent of the annual total quota allotted. The Johnson-Reed Act also expanded the category of illegal aliens, reaffirming the principle of Chinese exclusion and barring Japanese and other immigrants from the "Asiatic Zone," defined in 1917 as stretching from Afghanistan to the Pacific, on the legal grounds of their exclusion from citizenship.
By the 1920s, Ellis Island officials were processing far fewer arrivals and were no longer providing medical or mental exams or housing immigrants who were ill, since the passport and visa requirements relocated many aspects of verification and inspection from Ellis Island back to the country of origin. During the 1930s, nearly as many people left as entered the United States, and Ellis Island officials processed some immigrants returning to Europe. During World War I, Ellis Island became a temporary detention center for "enemy aliens," and in 1919 radicals rounded up by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (1872-1936) and housed incommunicado prior to deportation included the Russian anarchist activists Emma Goldman (1869-1940) and Alexander Berkman (18701936). Ellis Island was increasingly used for detention and deportation of "aliens." By the 1930s, the people detained on the island were undocumented immigrants without passports or visas, foreign-born criminals awaiting deportation, and sick merchant mariners receiving treatment at the hospital.
During World War II (1939-1945), "enemy aliens" were again held on the island. After 1950, immigrants suspected of being communists were denied entry or detained awaiting deportation, including the West Indian Marxist writer C. L. R. James (1901-1989) in 1952. Despite the needs of the many refugees created during World War II, the restrictive immigration laws kept the numbers of European immigrants very small. Ellis Island was finally abandoned by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1954 and classified as surplus property. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s (1890-1969) General Services Administration tried unsuccessfully to sell Ellis Island and its buildings to the highest bidder in 1956. President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973), who traveled to the Statue of Liberty to sign immigration reform in 1965, granted landmark status to Ellis Island as part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument within the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. New interest in historic preservation and in European-heritage ethnicity generated popular and public support for the restoration and reopening of Ellis Island as an immigration museum in 1990.
