Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
After 1905, all immigrants would then pass before another doctor whose sole job was to perform a quick eye exam. If any of these medical officers found any sign of possible deficiency, they would use chalk to mark the immigrant with a letter.
L
stood for lameness and
E
stood for eye problems, for instance. Those chalk-marked immigrants, some 15 to 20 percent of all arrivals, would then be set aside for further physical or mental testing.
Immigration officials largely based their decisions of the desirability of immigrants on their mental, physical, and moral capacities. To modern ears, the notion of classifying any human being as “undesirable” is an uncomfortable one that smacks of discrimination and insensitivity, but we should be careful not to judge the past by modern-day standards. Instead, it is important to understand why Americans went about classifying people in this manner, however unpleasant that process might seem to us.
First, they were concerned that immigrants would become “public charges,” meaning they would not be able to take care of themselves. In the days before a federal welfare system and social safety net, this meant being wards of private charity or local institutions like poorhouses, hospitals, or asylums. If immigrants were to be allowed into the country, they needed to prove they were healthy and self-sufficient.
Second, immigrants were meant to work. Specifically, they were to be the manual labor that fueled the factories and mines of industrial America. Such tough work demanded strong physical specimens. Sickly, weak, or mentally deficient immigrants were deemed unlikely to survive the rigors of the factory.
Lastly, scientific ideas that would reshape the modern world were beginning to seep into the public consciousness in the late nineteenth century and affect the way Americans saw immigrants. Darwin’s theory of evolution and primitive genetic theory offered Americans dark lessons about the dangers of the wrong kinds of immigrant. Many Americans considered poverty, disease, and illiteracy to be hereditary traits that would be passed on to future generations, thereby weakening the nation’s gene pool and lowering the vitality of the average American, not just in the present, but for generations to come.
All of these ideas assume that it is acceptable for a nation to exclude immigrants it deems undesirable. Then, as now, Americans have grappled with the question: Is everyone in the world entitled to enter America? This question lies at the heart of the history of Ellis Island. At the time, most native-born Americans believed that they had the right to decide this as a matter of national sovereignty. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts summarized this view in a 1908 speech:
Every independent nation has, and must have, an absolute right to determine who shall come into the country, and secondly, who shall become a part of its citizenship, and on what terms. . . . The power of the American people to determine who shall come into the country, and on what terms, is absolute, and by the American people, I mean its citizens at any given moment, whether native born or naturalized, whose votes control the Government. . . . No one has a right to come into the United States, or become part of its citizenship, except by permission of the people of the United States.
Even though Lodge was an unabashed believer in the superiority of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, his ideas about national sovereignty strike at the heart of how any nation deals with those who knock at its gates.
The nation’s immigration law was predicated on the idea that a selfgoverning people could decide who may or may not enter the country. But that idea came into conflict with other ideals, such as America’s traditional history of welcoming newcomers. More importantly, it conflicted with the idea that the rights guaranteed in the Constitution were universal rights. How could the Declaration of Independence’s basic creed that all individuals were created equal mesh with the idea that some immigrants were desirable and others undesirable? That conflict between American ideals is central to an understanding of why Ellis Island was created in the first place.
T
RADITIONAL HISTORIES OF THE
Ellis Island period, like John Higham’s classic
Strangers in the Land
, focus on the rise and fall of nativism, which the historian defined as the “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign . . . connections.” Yet Higham would soon come to see the shortcomings of his own analysis. Shortly after the publication of his book, he asked: “Shall I confess that nativism now looks less adequate as a vehicle for studying the struggles of nationalities in America, than my earlier report of it, and other reports, might indicate?” He later admitted: “Repelled as I was not only by the xenophobias of the past but also by the nationalist delusions of the Cold War that were all around me, I had highlighted the most inflammatory aspects of ethnic conflict.”
The “nativist theme, as defined and developed to date, is imaginatively exhausted,” Higham concluded. By overemphasizing the psychological interpretations of American attitudes toward immigrants, he diminished the rationality of individuals and reduced their reactions to complex social changes down to primitive and primordial emotional reflexes. That does not mean downplaying the often ugly anti-immigrant sentiment that has characterized certain periods of American history. Higham is mostly correct that such feelings were rising in the late nineteenth century as the demographics of immigration shifted from northern Europeans to southern and eastern Europeans. He is also correct that World War I brought a significant opposition to foreigners.
However, both of these periods also saw a larger shift in American society. The former occurred during the dawning of the era of Progressive reforms, with the beginnings of the federal administrative state designed to enact those reforms. The latter occurred at a time of great disillusionment with reform and government in the wake of the Great War. As the Progressive impulse to regulate society ebbed, Americans instead tried to restore a lost world that had been overtaken by the rise of modern, industrial America.
By looking past the mere expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment and focusing on the implementation of immigration policy, we find that much of the debate surrounding Ellis Island was not as polarized as we might imagine. Despite the heated rhetoric, this debate took place within the proverbial forty-yard lines of American political life. There was considerable consensus about immigration. Most Americans found themselves in the political middle on the issue. That debate took place most famously at Ellis Island for more than three decades.
Few Americans argued for a completely open door to all immigrants and few argued for their complete exclusion. Allan McLaughlin, a doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service, put forth the parameters of the debate:
There are extremists who advocate the impossible—the complete exclusion of all immigrants or the complete exclusion of certain races. There are other extremists who pose as humanitarians and philanthropists and who advocate an act of lunacy—removing all restrictions and admitting all the unfortunate—the lame, the halt, the blind and the morally and physically diseased—without let or hindrance. Neither of these extreme positions is tenable. The debarring of all immigrants, or the unjust discrimination against any particular race, is illogical, bigoted and un-American. On the other hand, the indiscriminate admission of a horde of diseased, defective and destitute immigrants would be a crime against the body politic which could not be justified by false pretense of humanity or a mistaken spirit of philanthropy.
Americans rarely challenged the government’s right to exclude or deport immigrants, but rather fought over the legitimate criteria for exclusion and how strictly government should enforce those laws at immigration stations like Ellis Island.
Take the opinions of two men active in the debate during this time. Max Kohler was a lawyer for the American Jewish Committee who doggedly defended the rights of Jewish immigrants and criticized the strict enforcement of the law at Ellis Island. Nevertheless, he admitted that the immigration law at the time was appropriate in barring those deemed undesirable. “We do not want aliens to be admitted of any race or creed,” Kohler said, “suffering from loathsome or contagious diseases, mentally or morally defective, contract laborers or paupers or persona likely to become public charges in fact.” What he opposed was both the stricter enforcement of the law and the passage of any more restrictive measures by Congress to exclude immigrants.
On the other side was Commissioner-General of Immigration Frank Sargent. The former labor leader favored closer inspection and tighter restriction of immigrants, but conceded that he “would not advocate a ‘closed-door’ policy . . . as we still have need for a high class of aliens who are healthy and will become self-supporting.” For him and other like-minded individuals, the present law was fine, but needed to be more strictly enforced. The debate, then, was not one over the restriction of immigrants, but instead over the regulation of who may be allowed to enter the country.
“We desire to emphasize at this point that the immigration laws of the United States,” noted the American Jewish Committee in recommendations it made to the U.S. Immigration Commission, “have always been enacted to regulate immigration.” Both sides of the immigration debate agreed on the need for the United States to continue to accept immigrants and for the need to sort through those who arrived and reject those deemed undesirable. They differed, however, in how strictly to regulate immigration. In practice, this allowed almost three decades of continuous immigration, mostly from Europe, at levels that remain historic highs in American history. For all the talk about exclusion and restriction, less than 2 percent of individuals who knocked at its gate were ultimately excluded at Ellis Island.
The laws that dealt with European immigrants, as well as smaller numbers of Middle Eastern and Caribbean immigrants, were in marked contrast to the law directed toward Chinese immigrants. For the Chinese and other Asians, American immigration policy
was
one of restriction. This proved the exception to the larger rule of immigration regulation, and Americans at the time were quite conscious of this differential treatment and at pains not to replicate it with other immigrant groups. For Asians, their near-complete exclusion from the country was based on race; for all others seeking entry, officials would try to weed out supposedly undesirable immigrants based not on race, but rather on individual characteristics. Prejudice against southern and eastern Europeans certainly existed, but it was not written into the law until the quotas of the 1920s.
C
ONTRARY TO MUCH THAT
is written about American immigration, this book does not see this history strictly through the jaundiced interpretive lens of nativist sentiments or the sentimental notions of Ellis Island as a chronicle of American bounty and frothy idealism. Instead, this book looks at how actual people created, interpreted, and executed immigration laws at Ellis Island.
This is a story about the growing pains of a modern nation that was struggling with vast and seemingly disturbing changes. In response, America engaged in a debate about who could become an American. It was heated, loud, and often nasty. Raw emotions and blunt opinions were expressed in language that is often discomforting to modern readers.
In response to this debate, Congress translated these concerns into laws that were carried out at Ellis Island and other, smaller immigrant inspection stations around the country, where officials were confronted with the very real mass of humans who washed upon America’s shores daily.
Guarding the borders became the key to defining the character of the nation itself. Ellis Island represents the dawning of a new age: the rise of the United States as a modern nation-state. After the Civil War, it would become an industrial powerhouse, achieve a unified nation from coast to coast, and expand its power on the world stage by extending its sphere of influence into Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. To manage this economic, military, and political behemoth, a new federal government had to be created almost from scratch. Immigration control should be placed in the context of the rise of this modern state.
The immigration service that ran inspection stations like Ellis Island was one of the country’s first large government programs. The strong federal government that we know today was in its infancy in the late 1800s. As the federal government devoted more time, energy, money, and manpower to inspecting immigrants, it created a larger and larger administrative system. Such a system created its own set of rules.
Instead of seeing the work of Ellis Island in terms of immigration restriction, it is better to see it as a form of regulation. The relatively unobtrusive federal government of the nineteenth century evolved into a system of greater regulation by the twentieth century, one that did not end capitalism, but sought to control its excesses. Over that same period, the laissez-faire attitude of the federal government gave way to a system that did not end immigration, but regulated it in the public interest.
The impulse behind immigration control was the same impulse that banned child labor, regulated railroads and monopolies, opened settlement houses, created national parks, battled the corruption of urban political machines, and advocated for temperance. It was these reforms of the Progressive Era that drove the expansion of the federal government to ensure that it would regulate private business in the public interest.
In this sense, immigration control fits well as a Progressive reform. To many reformers, big business, together with selfish steamship companies and aided by corrupt political bosses, sought to keep the faucet of immigration open full blast as a source of cheap labor to power the new industrial economy and provide voters for urban political machines. Reformers wanted to temper this by regulating immigration, not ending it. They believed that a large industrial and urban society needed to be actively molded and shaped, and that the older laissezfaire philosophy of the nineteenth century was inadequate to deal with the problems of the modern era.