(Continued from “Ellis Island not Gilligan’s Island, Part One”)
Our current immigration mess did not happen overnight. Like many societal ailments this nation has today, its germs came from the 1960s.
On the TV in the mid 1960s was a dumb but harmless sitcom called “Gilligan’s Island.” It was about a group of people who survived a tourist boat wreck and landed on an uninhabited island. It had some nice eye candy in Dawn Wells and Tina Louise, but the focus of the show was on Bob Denver’s character Gilligan, the poor stooge who was the butt of everyone else’s jokes because of his dumb ideas which he expressed dumbly.
Gilligan’s bumbling would be an apt metaphor for the nation’s immigration policy from that time forward to today. What is considered the “modern era” of immigration began during the administration of Lyndon Johnson in the mid 1960s, while “Gilligan’s Island” was a popular show. Johnson and his Congress produced the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which introduced daisy-chaining of families of aliens into this country as federal immigration policy. In a way it is fitting, because Johnson owed his seat in the Senate (and his subsequent career which put him in the White House when he and the Deep State arranged the murder of John Kennedy) to illegal votes attributed to Mexican nationals in South Texas.
(In today’s post, and over the next post or two, I am going to review immigration for you in an era when America did it right. I researched and published the book “When America Did Immigration Right” in 2010. I did the work using US laws and public record and interviews with subject experts. When you are done reading these, you will know more about immigration than almost all of our members of Congress and all of the liars in the media.)
It is easy and irresponsible to criticize the majority of immigration agents at Ellis Island and elsewhere from the safety of today. The truth is no other country welcomed immigrants like the United States did, and as a nation the United States was barely 100 years old itself when Ellis Island opened for business. In that time, the United States grew from an Atlantic Seaboard country into a country roughly as large as Europe, and had withstood a terrible Civil War.
There was no federal immigrant inspection law until 1891.Until that time, state officials had admitted immigrants to the United States. Federal authorities had federalized immigrant processing in New York City’s harbor in 1890, and they federalized immigrant processing in the rest of the country in 1891.
This chapter continues to look at how American officials screened immigrants coming through Ellis Island. We focus on Ellis Island for a very simple reason – volume. From when the U.S. government first started screening immigrants in New York in 1890 until the end of the great waves of immigration in 1924, federal agents on Ellis Island and elsewhere in the harbor facilities of New York City processed about 70% of all immigrants seeking to gain entry into the United States.
LEGAL INSPECTION OR PRIMARY INSPECTION
If an immigrant passed the in-line medical exam and no doctor decided he or she was diseased, crippled, or mentally defective, and no matron decided she was a prostitute, they would route him or her to the Registry Room, a huge auditorium-sized room that occupied the center of the second floor of the Main Building of Ellis Island.
In the Registry Room, she or he would undergo the legal inspection. (People pulled out of line for closer medical or mental evaluations who passed these evaluations would also then undergo the legal inspection in the Registry Room.) Ellis Island agents also called this inspection the “primary inspection.”
Italian man awaits primary inspection. Photo by Augustus Sherman, courtesy NYPL
During this inspection, the inspectors questioned the immigrants to account for them and to verify the information about them on the ship’s manifest. They also were looking for potential “problem children” that they would have to bar from entering the United States.
The ship’s captain had to turn in the manifest to American immigration officers at the port of arrival. He had to list American citizens in steerage aboard his ship and his crew members also. (Many Americans and immigrants who weren’t citizens yet made more than one trip across the ocean for business or family reasons.) The ship’s manifest for steerage passengers contained many more questions than did the manifest for first class and second class passengers. The captain of the ship had to make sure there were answers for all of these questions from the steerage passengers.
Each inspector had a copy of the ship’s manifest, so he could double-check the immigrants’ verbal answers with the entries about them on the ship’s manifest. This is another reason the inspectors tried to keep the immigrants who were listed on the same manifest page grouped together as much as possible.
Inspectors asked the immigrants the “29 Questions” (or whatever questions the law said steerage aliens had to answer at the time) on the two-page form, such as:
1. Passenger number on list
2. Family name and given name
3. Age (years and months)
4. Sex
5. Married or single
6. Calling or occupation
7. Able to read/Able to write
8. “Nationality (country of which citizen or subject)”
9. “Race or people (determined by the stock from which the alien sprang and the language they speak)”
10. Last permanent residence (country, then city or town)
11. “The name and complete address of nearest relative or friend in country whence alien came.”
12. Final destination (state, then city or town)
13. Passenger number on list (repeated because this was the first line on the second page of the form)
14. “Whether having a ticket to such final destination”
15. “By whom was passage paid? (Whether alien paid his own passage, whether paid for by any other person, or by any corporation, society, municipality, or government)”
16. “Whether in possession of $50, and if less, how much?”
17. “Whether before in the United States; and if so, when and where?”
18. “Whether going to join a relative or friend; and if so, what relative or friend, and his name and complete address”
19. “Ever in Prison, almshouse, or institution for care and treatment of the insane, or supported by charity? If so, which?”
20. “Whether a Polygamist”
21. “Whether an Anarchist”
22. “Whether coming by reason of any offer, solicitation, promise or agreement, expressed or implied, to labor in the United States”
23. “Condition of Health, Mental and Physical”
24. “Deformed or Crippled, Nature, length of time, and cause”
25. Height
26. Complexion
27. Color of hair/Color of eyes
28. Marks of Identification
29. Place of Birth (country, then city or town) (13)
Inspectors would ask these questions of the men, women, and teenage boys and girls.
Starting in 1917, the inspectors would ask would-be immigrants 17 and older to read a selection in their own language, because now the law required immigrants to be literate in their native language. (They made exceptions for illiterate immigrants whose literate husbands or children or grandchildren were legally admitted immigrants or American citizens who sent for them. Immigration officials would still allow these people entry even if they could not read. Officials also made an exception for the unmarried or widowed daughters of legally admitted immigrants or American citizens who were 17 or older and illiterate.) (14)
Interpreters fluent in almost every language in Europe and the Middle East stood by to help the immigrants understand the inspectors’ questions and the inspectors understand the immigrants’ answers. (At Angel’s Island in San Francisco Bay and in other ports along the West Coast, interpreters fluent in Oriental languages were available to help the immigrants and the inspectors.)
Registry inspectors (the inspectors who performed legal or primary inspections) asked immigrants how they expected to support themselves, and other simple questions aimed at determining why the immigrants were coming to the United States. They were supposed to screen out contract laborers whose presence threatened the livelihoods of American workers. They were also supposed to screen out burdens on society like paupers and the unemployable. (Medical inspectors had presumably already screened out the physically and mentally defective.) And they were supposed to screen out the chancres of human society, such as common criminals and sociopaths, anarchists and other troublemakers, and perverts such as pimps, prostitutes, and polygamists.
An observer, commenting on the primary inspection in 1913, noted, “The line moves on past the female inspector looking for prostitutes, and then past the inspectors who ask the (then) twenty-two questions required by law. Here is where the lies are told. Most of the immigrants have been coached as to what answers to give. Here is an old woman who says she has three sons in America, when she has but one. The more she talks the worse she entangles herself. Here is a Russian Jewish girl who has run away to escape persecution. She claims a relative in New York at an address found not to exist; she is straightaway in trouble.” (15)
Many immigrants, subject to human failings like all of us, would lie if they thought it would help them gain entrance to the United States. It was the job of the inspectors to sniff out those who could be a detriment to American society, and hold them up so the authorities could decide whether to deport them.
In the following paragraphs, we will discuss some of the main reasons agents rejected would-be immigrants.
CONTRACT LABOR
Some of the first federal immigration laws – the Act of March 3, 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885 – aimed to keep robber barons from importing unskilled foreign laborers to break the wage scale of American workers. In fact, the first of these laws went into effect only six years after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Robber baron Charlie Crocker had imported many coolies from China at dirt-cheap wages to build the railroad line from the Sacramento area through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, across Nevada, and into Utah. Most immigrants came to seek better conditions in America, but the goal of American immigration policy was not to let the robber barons import so many people willing to work for next to nothing that the standard of living of the average American would decline to European or even down to Asian standards.
This is in stark contrast to today, where immigration from Latin America and Asia – even illegal immigration – has official encouragement because government leaders and the corporate types who bankroll their campaigns evidently have no problem with breaking the wage scales in America’s basic industries.
Swedish immigrants helped Americans and other immigrants turn the Great Plains into the world’s breadbasket. Immigrants who could farm were desirable. Kansas Historical Society
Immigrants had to convince the inspectors they had trade skills or at least the willingness to work, so they would not get classified as losers who would be deported because they were “liable to become a public charge.” However, if they told inspectors they had jobs lined up, the inspectors would pull them out of line as suspected contract laborers, and the officials would likely deport them. The best thing for an immigrant to do was to tell the truth, and not lie or exaggerate in hopes of impressing an inspector who had heard it all before.
Fiorello La Guardia, an interpreter at Ellis Island from 1907 through 1910, had this to say about the dilemma of many people on the contract labor and pauper questions:
“It is a puzzling fact that one provision of the Immigration Law excludes any immigrant who has no job and classifies him as likely to become a public charge, while another provision excludes an immigrant if he has a job! Common sense suggested that any immigrant who came into the United States in those days to settle here permanently surely came here to work. However, under the law, he could not have any more than a vague hope of a job. In answering the inspectors’ questions, immigrants had to be very careful, because if their expectations were too enthusiastic, they might be held as coming in violation of the contract labor provision. Yet if they were too indefinite, if they knew nobody, had no idea where they were going to get jobs, they might be excluded as likely to become public charges. Most of the inspectors were conscientious and fair. Sometimes, I felt, large batches of those held and deported as violating the contract labor provision were, perhaps, only borderline cases and had no more than the assurance from relatives or former townsmen of jobs on their arrival.”
However, La Guardia said, “The history of immigrant labor in this country fully justified such a law (contract laborer exclusion). He said before the contract laborer exclusion law went on the books in the 1880s, “Our country went through a period of exploitation of labor which is one of the most sordid and blackest pictures in our entire history. The railroads and our young industries were built by exploited immigrant labor brought here under contract.”
“Shipload after shipload of immigrants were brought into this country by contractors, or padrones, who had already made contracts with the railroads and other large corporations for their services. The wages, at best, were disgracefully low. In the eighteen nineties these wages averaged $1.25 to $1.50 a day. The padrone was paid by the corporation. In addition to the low wages he paid the laborers, he took a rake-off from their meager daily earnings. In addition to that, he boarded and fed the immigrants, for which he often made exorbitant charges, deducted, too, from their small pay. Often he had a company store as well, in which he sold them supplies at excessive prices. How they ever managed to save enough to send for their families is a wonder. The twelve-hour day was not unusual, and the seven-day week was common.” (16)
“LIABLE TO BE A PUBLIC CHARGE”
The inspectors were also looking to keep out of the country those foreigners who would be a burden to society. Besides asking them about what their trades were or what their plans were, inspectors would ask immigrants how much money they had on them. Being virtually penniless at first was no bar to getting into the country. In the 1890s and through most of the first decade of the 1900s, inspectors let even the indigents in. After all, many people made it in America after arriving with little more than the clothes on their backs, including Robert Watchorn, the Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island from 1905 through 1909. Watchorn had come from England in 1880.
Williams in his second term as commissioner at Ellis Island stirred up controversy by enforcing the “pauper” and “public charge” portion of the immigration law more strictly. Williams tried to have barred some of those immigrants who came to America with less than $25 per adult. His argument was immigrants would need that much money as a minimum to pay their expenses until they could get jobs. People who showed up with almost no money, he argued, were likely going to have to receive charity in America.
The eye inspection. Inspectors were looking for trachoma, a debilitating eye disease they wanted kept out of America.
In a memo he wrote for his agents, he acknowledged there was no legal minimum in cash an immigrant needed to enter America. However, he said, “In most cases it will be unsafe for immigrants to arrive with less than twenty-five ($25) besides railroad tickets to destination, while in many cases they should have more.” He wanted inspectors to take this into consideration when deciding whether to admit immigrants.
There would be no formal requirement for an immigrant to show he or she had at least a certain amount of cash to avoid being sent back as a pauper during Williams’ second watch. But Williams instructed his inspectors to use the $25 amount as a guideline to determine if an immigrant could be excluded as being likely to become a public charge. He noted, “This notice is not, as many have claimed it to be, a rule under which inspectors must exclude immigrants with less than $25, and thus an attempt to create a property test not found in the statutes. It is merely a humane notice to intending immigrants that upon landing they will require at least some small amount of money with which to meet their wants while looking about for employment.” (17)
Williams said common sense dictated setting a minimum amount of cash needed and letting would-be immigrants and shipping companies know what America expected of them. He blamed shipping companies for bringing large numbers of practically penniless people to America, where they would require charity to survive until they could eke out meager livings. As an example, Williams noted 189 of the 251 passengers a steamship offloaded for processing at Ellis Island on the 4th of July 1909 had $10 or less.
Williams aimed his policy not so much at the poorest immigrants themselves, but at the steamship line operators who didn’t care who they hauled in steerage, as long as they made money. Williams figured setting such a money requirement, even informally, would make steamship company officials stop carrying so many paupers to America. This is because every immigrant rejected by the inspectors when the steamship company’s people should have known he or she couldn’t be allowed into America meant a $100 fine to the steamship company. This also meant the steamship company would have to bring the immigrant back to the port at which he or she got on the ship at the steamship company’s expense.
Williams’ policy caused an uproar. Many people accused him of discriminating against the poor from Italy and Eastern Europe. However, his policy was a guideline rather than an absolute rule. Many immigrants who were in their 20s in this period would say later the inspectors let them in despite not having $25 because they looked like vigorous young men and women capable of finding work and making good.
Inspectors allowed another common-sense exception to the indigence guideline. Most of the time, women coming with their children and very little money were able to gain entrance to America after they telegramed their husbands or relatives and their husbands or relatives sent back word they had money and would support their wives and children or family members.
Officials of the steamship companies found a dodge that still enabled them to transport large numbers of indigents to America and make money doing so. Percy Baker, a superintendent at Ellis Island, said, “The steamship companies often advanced ten or fifteen dollars to aliens without money. And I have an idea they got most of it back.” (18)
An observer, commenting on the primary inspection in 1913, noted, “Sometimes men (would-be immigrants) are turned back for trivial cases. Four Greeks were going to Canada, via New York. The Canadian law requires each immigrant to have twenty-five dollars. They have $24.37 each. When they found their funds short, they wanted to come into the United States, but could not. A child is taken down with a contagious disease and is carried to the hospital. The mother must wait and cannot even see her child. A man and his son have had their money stolen from them in the steerage; they lack twenty dollars and must go back. And so the sad tale goes on every day.”
He noted if there were no standards, “Then sixteen thousand debarred aliens a year would lay siege to their (the inspectors’) sympathies and each would regard his own as a special case, and innumerable difficulties would result. All authorities agree that the system in vogue is just about as humane and as free from hardships as any system that might be devised, and that would maintain the interests of the nation as paramount to the interests of the individual immigrant.” (19)
The $25 “guideline” no doubt kept many would-be immigrants at home. One of these was apparently a young mechanic from the former Yugoslavia named Josip Broz. When author Louis Adamic, an American citizen and native of Slovenia, visited Yugoslavia in 1949, Broz told him the combined expenses of a train ride to Hamburg, a steerage ticket on a ship crossing the Atlantic and the $25 he thought he would need to gain entrance to America kept him from coming here in 1910. Instead, he stayed home. He eventually became famous, infamous, or notorious, depending on your point of view. For this Josip Broz would become the dictator commonly known as Tito. (20)
CRIMINAL SCREENING
Inspectors asked aliens if they had been convicted of and imprisoned for any crimes. Some people told the truth. Others lied about their criminal records, thinking they could get away with it.
Many people who had committed political offenses were likely to admit to what they had done, knowing that Americans admired people who fought authoritarian rule. (We need more of that in this country today!) After all, America became free by revolution against Britain. American authorities did not hold political arrests, except those for anarchism-related offenses, against would-be immigrants. The United States welcomed large numbers of Irish rebels and German dissidents throughout the 1800s.
Moslem rioters torch Denmark and other European cities. We screened alien criminal vermin out of America in the Ellis Island Era to the best of our abilities. Part of the screening process was to reject those with ideas inimical to the American way of life, like jihadism, Nazism, Communism, and anarchism.
Others told the truth because they were honest by nature. Public disorder arrests, like for drunkenness or fighting, were not uncommon among people in the 1800s and early 1900s. (Nor are they uncommon today.) Likewise, many people, especially peasants, were arrested for acts of petty misbehavior that would not be illegal in the United States. Inspectors didn’t automatically flag aliens who admitted to such problems.
Note that the inspectors asked aliens if they had ever been convicted or imprisoned, not arrested. This reflected the American notion that a person accused of a crime was innocent until proven guilty. Being arrested for a crime didn’t make a person guilty, unlike in Europe or Asia. An alien who was wise to the American way could conceal his arrest record if he hadn’t actually received a prison sentence.
On the flip side of the coin, European officials did try to send some of their losers to America. And many other immigrants tried to hide their brushes with the law because they were common criminals instead of patriots, union people, poor peasants, or guys who got into scrapes after a little too much booze or after some lowlife said something uncalled-for to his wife. (Bear in mind many Americans are the descendants of English thieves and whores who were essentially dumped here by British authorities before the American Revolution.)
Most criminals probably did escape detection, but some did not. Here’s why:
The Ellis Island era (1892 through 1924) did not have international police computer networking, the computer database or the Internet. Likewise, in those days there was no DNA sampling. Forensic science, first widely popularized in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books of the 1880s and 1890s, was just becoming a formal discipline. Fingerprinting, trace evidence analysis, document examination, ballistics, and blood typing and grouping would all become acceptable forensic procedures during the Ellis Island era.
Immigration officials in that era did have the telephone and the telegraph. The Atlantic Cable connected Europe to America for telegraph messages, so American diplomats and European officials could contact American immigration authorities about wanted or suspicious people who might be sailing to America.
Because of the development of the long-range radiotelegraph (“wireless”) around the turn of the century, ships at sea could receive and send telegraph messages also. In fact, such a ship-to-shore message led to the 1910 capture and hanging of Dr. Hawley Crippen, an American who fled England for Canada aboard a steamship with his young lover after he reportedly killed and dismembered his unfaithful and domineering wife in their London house. Likewise, authorities in Europe or American officials stationed in Europe could use the radiotelegraph to relay messages about criminals trying to escape to America so immigration officials would be ready for them. (21)
American immigration officials would use these methods of quick communication to get tips on incoming bad guys. One of the most famous cases, according to Edward Corsi, the commissioner who ran Ellis Island in the early 1930s, a generation after he underwent processing at Ellis Island himself, was that of his former fellow countryman Benito Mussolini. Corsi said Mussolini, before he became dictator of Italy, was in hot water with Italian authorities. He was reportedly contemplating fleeing to America, according to a confidential source. Word of Mussolini’s potential escape to America somehow reached the State Department in Washington, Corsi said, and that agency’s officials immediately gave immigration officials at Ellis Island and other inspection stations the heads-up. “If he (Mussolini) had attempted to land in the United States,” Corsi said, “he would have been detained and examined by a board of special inquiry.”
Mussolini might not have needed an interpreter for such a hearing. Corsi, when he was a reporter, had interviewed Mussolini in the 1920s, after he took over Italy. Evidently Il Duce was confident enough in his foreign language skills that he didn’t use a single word of Italian in answering fellow Italian Corsi’s questions!
Corsi’s own father had been a prominent Italian politician. People in Italy elected the elder Corsi to the Italian parliament while he was in exile in Switzerland. On his return to Italy in triumph, Filippo Corsi dropped dead as he was giving his victory speech. Corsi’s mother eventually married an army officer, and they decided to try life in America. She became ill after three years in the tenements of New York City and returned to Italy to die. The stepfather raised young Corsi and his brother and sisters in America. (22)
Even though technology in that era was not as advanced as it its now, immigration agents were not necessarily dumber than the airline screeners of today who fail to catch weapons being smuggled aboard aircraft despite having metal detectors and X-ray machines.
There were some agents – like good policemen in all eras – who were naturals at finding people who were criminals or other undesirables. Profiling, noticing behavior untypical for a situation, and figuring out when someone is lying by listening for contradictions or improbable statements are skills not dependent upon technology. American officials had the ability to interrogate suspicious aliens or those who knew them. And they did not have anywhere near the interference from professional obstructionist groups and money-sniffing attorneys as immigration officials do today. American officials also had at their disposal the oldest of criminal investigation tools – the informants. European officials and American officials overseas and in America received many tips from informants for reasons ranging from a desire to help to a desire for revenge to a desire for money.
William Williams said, “Criminals and other bad characters, usually bearing no earmarks, seek to enter the country by taking passage in the cabin (second class), and yet the intelligent work of the boarding inspectors often results in their apprehension.” Williams noted the tips his agents got were usually valid, “yet some of them are lodged here through spite.” He added, “The power of the immigration officials is so summary that foreign authorities desiring to have an alien apprehended often seek to accomplish through the Immigration Service what should be accomplished through extradition proceedings. This office always declines to allow itself to be used in this manner.” (23)
Europe was authoritarian, America was democratic. Even in alleged democracies like France and England, the government had the legal power to punish dissidents that the American government did not have. (Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Nixon, and Clinton and their minions had to break the law to punish dissidents.) British officials routinely jailed Irish patriots who spoke their minds. French officials sentenced Emile Zola to prison on a libel charge for writing “J’accuse,” a tract concerning the Dreyfus case, even though what Zola wrote was true. (Zola fled to Britain to avoid prison.) American officials, aware that America became free because Americans rebelled against British rule, would never bar immigrants just because they had committed political offenses in other countries. (Anarchists, Nazis, and Communists would be about the only exceptions to this policy.) Political offenses were not crimes of murder, rape, assault, arson, robbery, theft, dishonesty, or sexual depravity. It would be un-American to turn over immigrants to the officials of another country just because the immigrants had broken some political law that wouldn’t stand in The Land of the Free. Williams, by refusing to be the toady of European and Asian governments, was simply affirming America’s tolerance for most malcontents.
Williams had no similar qualms about getting information on common criminals so he could have them detained and deported. He thought America’s leaders weren’t doing enough to ensure the steamship companies checked immigrants and weeded out common criminals instead of making money dumping them in America. He wrote, “As matters stand to-day our Government makes no effort to obtain the valuable information undoubtedly contained in foreign criminal records as to many immigrants who come here. The transportation companies should be required to satisfy the immigration authorities as to each immigrant above a certain age that the criminal records of the locality from which he comes have been searched, and they should also be required to furnish a statement as to what, if anything, has been found therein, and a civil penalty should be imposed for furnishing false information.” (24)
Williams’ idea was a good one on paper, but it would not have worked that well in the Ellis Island era.
There was not the level of co-operation between European officials and American officials that there is today. European leaders still underestimated American power (America did not take part in World War One until 1917, and Woodrow Wilson was no Theodore Roosevelt), and viewed America as a dumping ground for their riffraff. European officials were authoritarian and much more corrupt than American officials, and American officials had a natural distrust of the slimy European officials.
It is true that most immigrants had no criminal record anyway. It was also true that many European government officials wanted some of their people to leave, especially if they were ethnic minorities or poor people who didn’t seem to be able to help their national economies. They would have been only too willing to help these people emigrate, and furnish clean criminal records on these people, even if they had to doctor their records.
European officials also figured it would be cheaper for them to allow some of their petty criminals to come to America than to jail them, if only they could be assured these criminals would come to America and not somehow hide in Europe or come back. So they might falsely give these losers clean criminal record reports to deceive American authorities.
On the other hand, European officials punished many opponents of their regimes as criminals. Likewise, they oppressed ethnic minorities within their borders. Since many immigrants were refugees from corrupt or oppressive regimes, it would have been impossible for these people to have gotten a favorable report from police authorities in their countries. And this wasn’t just countries like Russia or Germany. Officials in Britain and France jailed dissidents also, and sought to extradite those who escaped their clutches.
One last practical difficulty with Williams’ idea was that the methods of record keeping and identifications weren’t as good then. Criminals themselves could get false documents to hide their true identities. They still do it today, even with supposedly better technology and supposedly better trained agents opposing them.
If an inspector determined an immigrant was a worker coming to the United States on a labor contract that put him in direct competition with American workers, the inspector could pull him or her out of line and refer his or her case to a Board of Special Inquiry on Ellis Island. Likewise, any immigrant the inspector believed was likely to become a public charge (on grounds of anything from having no money, to having subnormal intelligence, to having no definite goals, to having no normal job skills to engaging in begging on a regular basis) could wind up in front of a Board of Special Inquiry.
Any alien who was found out to be a common criminal overseas (as opposed to being a political criminal, who Americans tended to welcome) was definitely going before a Board of Special Inquiry. Any alien involved in an immoral means of making money (such as being a prostitute or a pimp or a madam) or in other immoral behavior (such as being a polygamist – profiling aimed at Moslems and Mormons) could find himself or herself in the line for a Board of Special Inquiry. Someone who was honest enough and dumb enough to admit he or she was an anarchist, a Communist, or any other crackpot who advocated the overthrow of the American form of government would get to know a Board of Special Inquiry better as a detainee trying to argue why they should not have him or her deported from the United States. And finally, people who were caught lying to the inspectors were liable for detention and a hearing in front of a Board of Special Inquiry. The board members would rule on whether to deport the immigrant based on his or her legal fitness, ability to earn a living, and character attributes.
Jewish girl undergoes medical exam. Ellis Island inspectors had to reject people that were liable to be a drain on American society due to their inability to earn a living and have relatives who could help them. America is a nation, not a dumping ground or a welfare Disneyland.
The largest number of aliens who the immigration officials refused entrance to from 1892 through 1924 were people they figured would be drains upon society (“likely to become a public charge,” they called it). They barred 196,208 aliens on these grounds. The second largest number of aliens denied entry from 1892 through 1924 were the 72,640 aliens barred from entering the United States because immigration officials determined they were physical or mental defectives. The third largest group of people the immigration officials kept out of America from 1892 through 1924 were the 38,630 aliens deemed to be contract laborers, people who the American working public figured the robber barons were importing to break the wage structure. (25)
Officials at Ellis Island “temporarily detained” a large number of aliens. They were presumed qualified to enter the United States, but they needed relatives or friends to contact the officials at Ellis Island and vouch for them, and make arrangements to pick them up, or send them money for train fare. When the relatives or friends did what they needed to do, then the immigrant was free to go. If there was no contact from the immigrant’s professed relatives or friends for five days after the immigrant landed, he or she would have to go before the Board of Special Inquiry. Robert Watchorn said his people detained 121,737 immigrants “to be called for by relatives” from July 1906 through June 1907, roughly one out of every eight immigrants who landed in the port of New York. (26)
Officials at Ellis Island “medically detained” a fair percentage of immigrants because they had an ailment needing hospitalization. (This was typically about 1% of the number of immigrants processed at Ellis Island any given year.) The immigrant would have to undergo treatment in the hospital on Ellis Island, and had to stay there until a doctor discharged the immigrant from the hospital and cleared him or her medically. When the immigrant recovered, he or she was free to go.
Now that we’ve covered all the potential ways the agents could detain and send back would-be immigrants, let’s give the big picture. Despite the immigrants’ fears, and the critiques of self-appointed do-gooders and immigrant societies, the inspectors let in the vast majority of immigrants they questioned.
Philip Cowen, an American-born son of Prussian Jewish immigrants who worked at Ellis Island as an inspector, said in 1907 (the busiest year at Ellis Island, at which a million would-be immigrants landed), there were many days when the Registry Division inspectors checked 5000 or more immigrants, and since there were at most 21 inspectors available for the two shifts during the day, this meant an inspector could count on checking about 250 immigrants on his shift on such a day. (27)
A 1909 labor force report by special immigrant inspector Roger O’Donnell noted there were 17 inspectors in the Registry Division, where the primary inspections took place. (This does not count the 14 inspectors serving as members of Special Inquiry Boards, or the 12 inspectors who were part of the Boarding Division, or the 21 other inspectors sprinkled throughout the other divisions on Ellis Island.) Since 580,000 immigrants came through the port of New York in 1908, and the vast majority of these landed at Ellis Island, the average primary inspector in the Registry Division inspected more than 30,000 immigrants that year, an average of more than 100 per day (assuming a six-day workweek and no help from the inspectors in the other divisions). O’Donnell noted the authorities on Ellis Island only asked for four more inspectors. (28)
When the inspectors were satisfied immigrants passed all the requirements for gaining entry to the country, they would hand “landing cards” to the immigrants. The inspectors sent them down to the first floor of the Main Building so they could get their belongings and make arrangements to go to their destinations.
We’ll pick up this aspect of the immigrants’ progress after we talk about the Boards of Special Inquiry.
BOARDS OF SPECIAL INQUIRY
Slightly more than 20 million immigrants came to the United States during the busiest years of the Ellis Island era (1892 through 1924). Of these, more than 14 million immigrants gained entry through the Port of New York; the vast majority of these gained entry through Ellis Island.
Most immigrants who came through Ellis Island and other immigration stations were able to gain entrance into America. But about two percent did not. While this is a small percentage, it means the officials at Ellis Island and other American immigration facilities turned away about 400,000 people in that era.
The members of the Boards of Special Inquiry heard the cases of those who the medical and mental inspectors and/or the registry inspectors (the legal inspectors) believed should be denied entry to the United States. An inspector could pull someone out of line, but he did not have the authority to exclude him. The board members could.
Woman undergoes mental exam. Photo by Augustus Sherman, courtesy NYPD
The members of the Boards of Special Inquiry reviewed each inspector’s reason for sending each immigrant to them, reviewed the documents pertaining to each immigrant, questioned each immigrant themselves (usually through interpreters, but often enough someone on the board could speak the immigrant’s language), and made a quick decision on whether to admit or deport each immigrant detained for possible deportation.
Each immigrant had the right to appeal a board of special inquiry decision to deport him to the commissioner at the immigration station. It was also possible for an immigrant to appeal a board of inquiry decision to the Department of Commerce and Labor (and after the split of the department into two departments, the immigrant could appeal to the Department of Labor). It was also possible for an immigrant to appeal to the Secretary of the Department himself. In reality, appeals to the Department rarely happened, because most immigrants lacked the skill to argue a technical case themselves and the money to hire a lawyer to do it for them.
It was possible for an immigrant to appeal a board of inquiry decision at Ellis Island if he could provide proper evidence that the board members had overlooked when hearing his case, or if evidence turned up later that he didn’t have when he landed at Ellis Island. Such evidence, for instance, could include a witness who could come to Ellis Island and vouch for an immigrant, or a telegram from a relative proving the immigrant had a place to go, or proof of other disputed issues. Williams said on his second watch as commissioner there could be from 15 to 70 appeals a day.
Williams said hearing appeals enabled him to see how good a job each of his board members were doing, and also gave him another tool to spot-check the work of his line inspectors. He said he wanted to make sure the board members put the proper questions to immigrants to get the relevant facts of the case so they could make just decisions based on the record and the law. Williams said even if he overturned a board’s decision and allowed an immigrant entry to the country, this often meant he had more discretion in hearing an appeal than the board members did in reaching a decision, and not necessarily that his board members had done wrong in denying the immigrant entry in the first place.
“Good board members are not easily found,” Williams said. “They must, amongst other things, be intelligent, able to exercise sound judgment and to elicit relevant facts from immigrants and witnesses who are often stupid or deceitful.” (29)
Each of these boards at Ellis Island made decisions on 50 to 100 immigrant cases a day, Williams said in 1903, depending on the type of case, and the difficulty of communicating with the immigrants before them. (Medical exclusions were open and shut cases; public charge cases were also fairly routine most of the time.) Williams said in 1903 three boards were at work every day, and on days when a larger number of immigrants landed at Ellis Island than usual, a fourth board would work on cases. Williams in 1912 noted that there could be as many as eight boards hearing cases on Ellis Island on given days.
The men on the Boards of Special Inquiry worked at traffic court speed on cases where much more was at stake for the accused than points on a license. Were the board members of the Boards of Special Inquiry “hanging judges?”
In fiscal 1907 (July 1906 through June 30, 1907), Robert Watchorn said his people at Ellis Island processed more than 1,100,000 aliens from 3818 ships, detained 64,510 aliens for a Board of Special Inquiry, and the board members ordered 7408 aliens (including 288 first class or second class passengers) deported. In other words, about 6 percent of the aliens who came through Ellis Island in the previous 12 months had to go before a Board of Special Inquiry, and almost 90 percent of these aliens received permission to enter the United States. (30)
In 1911 and again in 1912, more than 600,000 people immigrated to the port of New York, and the vast majority of them underwent processing at Ellis Island. William Williams, in his 1913 annual report, noted the Boards Of Special Inquiry heard more than 60,000 cases a year at Ellis Island. This means about one in ten would-be immigrants had to appear before a Board of Special Inquiry in those years. Dividing 60,000 cases by 300 work days per year meant the Boards of Special Inquiry heard about 200 cases a day.
In 1911, Williams’ workers at Ellis Island barred close to 13,000 would-be immigrants. In 1912, they barred about 8000. This means in the two years before Williams’ 1913 report, the Boards of Special Inquiry at Ellis Island apparently ruled in favor of the aliens often enough (and aliens’ appeals were successful often enough) that more than 80% of the more than 120,000 aliens who appeared before a Board of Special Inquiry in those two years received permission to enter the United States. (31)
These numbers imply the men of the Boards of Special Inquiry were fair-minded enough in spite of any prejudices they might have held.
DETENTION AT ELLIS ISLAND
Even though most aliens inspected at Ellis Island received permission to live in America, quite a few of them had to stay at Ellis Island one or more days until immigration officials allowed them to leave.
Quite a few immigrants had to stay in the hospital while they recuperated from their illnesses. Hospitalized immigrants, especially those who were children, often had a relative stay on the island to be near them. About 1% of those who landed at Ellis Island were hospitalized, and perhaps another 1% to 2% of those who landed at Ellis Island had to stay on Ellis Island to wait for their loved ones to get well.
There were many immigrants who had to wait for friends or relatives to pick them up, or for the arrival of money for train tickets, or for instructions from friends or relatives or proof that they had some place to go and friends or relatives to help them. Immigration agents had them telegraph their relatives or friends, or send postcards if they lived in or not too far from New York City. Agents at Ellis Island also tracked down detained immigrants to deliver them telegrams concerning travel arrangements from spouses, relatives, or friends. (Depending on the year, at least 10% of those who landed at Ellis Island were detained for such reasons.)
Then there were those who were being held for cases before the Boards of Special Inquiry, and those who were awaiting evidence that might overturn a Board of Special Inquiry ruling against them. (Depending on the year, anywhere from 5% to 10% of those who landed at Ellis Island were detained for hearings before the Boards of Special Inquiry.)
There were the unfortunates being held for mental evaluation.
And there were those being deported. Some were in the hospital awaiting the end of their treatment. Others were in confinement as criminals or other undesirables. The majority were in less stringent detention; they were being sent back because they were contract workers or people who the authorities deemed would be objects of charity. (About 2% of those who came to Ellis Island and at other immigration stations were detained for deportation.)
The immigration agents on Ellis Island provided food, shelter, security, and surveillance to all of these people.
Ellis Island employees and contract employees cared for and fed many hundreds of people per day. Foreign steamship lines and foreign governments had to pay us for taking care of their nationals.
Temporarily detained immigrants awaiting friends or money or instructions stayed nights under the charge of the Discharging Division (or later, under the charge of the Information Division).
Aliens being held for a board of special inquiry were under the charge of the Deportation Division (later known as the Deporting Division).
“Deferred” aliens (those who had appeared before a board of special inquiry but whose cases were delayed while awaiting further evidence) were under the charge of the Deportation Division.
Excluded adult male aliens (those the boards of inquiry ruled ineligible to enter the United States and were therefore deportable) stayed overnight in the “excluded” room. Excluded and deferred adult female aliens and children stayed overnight in another room. These were under the charge of the Deportation Division.
Other detained aliens without medical problems stayed in the dormitories or barracks on Ellis Island.
Agents segregated aliens being deported by sex and condition (pauperism, physical problems, contract workers). They held criminals being deported separate from the aliens who were unfortunate in their physical or mental or financial condition. The quarantine stations, local hospitals, and the quarantine hospital on Ellis Island (when it opened in 1911) held aliens being deported for contagious diseases.
In Ellis Island’s busiest years, it was common to detain as many as 1800 aliens at night on the island. Sometimes the agents had to detain as many as 2100 aliens a night if an especially large number of immigrants had come to Ellis Island. These people needed to be fed, sheltered, and protected. Robert Watchorn said in his 1907 annual report that his staffers averaged detaining 1400 people overnight each night for the entire year. (32)
This meant the cooks and kitchen attendants could have served immigrants about 500,000 dinners and another 500,000 or so breakfasts that year. (They also served lunch to immigrants being detained for some reason during the day.) Fines collected from the steamship companies, not taxpayers’ dollars, were the main source of money to pay for the food, the equipment, the furniture, the dishes, the utensils, and the salaries of the workers who fed the immigrants being detained.
Most aliens being detained behaved themselves, but there were some being deported who were upset about it and liable to cause trouble. Some would try to escape; others would attack immigration agents. Occasionally despondent aliens would attempt suicide. Also, there were some criminals being detained, and the violent offenders were by nature dangerous to others. Others detained as thieves, beggars, or prostitutes might try to ply their criminal trades while awaiting deportation unless they were kept away from the other immigrants. Thieves in particular required watching and disciplining. Other immigrants being detained on Ellis Island usually didn’t have much disposable income to give the beggars. And usually there was not enough privacy for prostitutes to consummate the transactions of their trade with other immigrants. However, they might try to bribe or blackmail immigration officers with sex.
Occasionally there were riots that needed quelling. Riots by Italians, Gypsies, and Moslems on Ellis Island were not uncommon.
Slavic detainees find a way to pass the time in detention.
There were some immigrants who were coming to America as a group to make trouble or perpetrate evil. The underworld imported a number of immigrants from Sicily and Southern Italy for criminal activities. There were prostitute brokers in Jewish communities in Russia and Eastern Europe who sold Jewish teenage girls and young women – their own people and sometimes their own kin – into sexual slavery in the United States. Their prey were only a couple of days from finding out about entry the hard way. Many of the Gypsies were organized thieves and con artists. And organized beggars from the Middle East were a nuisance to many cities and towns in America in the early 1900s.
There were some immigrants were used to committing acts of violence and other unsociable acts in their own countries. Some immigrants were thieves or bullies who hadn’t been caught. Some of them had criminal records but were able to escape detection as criminals because employees of the steamship lines that brought them to America had not made them prove they had clean records when they bought tickets.
And immigrants had the same kinds of flaws as people in America or anywhere else, thanks to the fallen nature of humanity that none of us is exempt from. Many immigrants had trouble behaving themselves in their homelands, and local officials all across Europe convinced many of them that getting a fresh start in America was a viable alternative to a life of crime and jail at home.
Guards would have to keep these scumbag would-be immigrants under control. Many women and children were frightened and needed protection. Despite the segregation of immigrants by sex (and younger boys with mothers also), if there weren’t guards and matrons present, some aliens would undoubtedly try to sexually assault women, teenage girls, or young girls or boys.
AFTER INSPECTION
After the immigrants passed inspection, most of them were free to leave Ellis Island. Families gathered, and groups of people traveling together gathered after everyone in their family or group got through inspection. Usually this would be on the first floor of the main building, where the baggage office, the railroad office and lobby, the waiting room, and the “New York Room” were.
If a family member had to wait because he or she was sick and was being medically detained, the family would make arrangements to pick up the sick family member later, or send money for the person’s train fare to rejoin them.
After passing inspection, the immigrants could exchange their European money for American money at the day’s official exchange rates for a small charge at the money exchange office. Those immigrants needing to send a telegram could do so at one of the telegraph offices. Telegrams coming to immigrants from relatives and friends with instructions came through one of these telegraph offices.
Those immigrants needing railroad tickets to other cities could buy them at the railroad ticket office. Some immigrants needed ship tickets if they were sailing to another port on America’s eastern seaboard. They could buy these tickets at Ellis Island also. Roughly two-thirds of the immigrants bought tickets from one of the railroad lines or one of the Atlantic Coast steamship lines.
German family gets ticketed and tagged so they don’t get lost on their train trip to their final destination in America. Photo by Augustus Sherman, courtesy NYPL
The immigrants would get their luggage from the Baggage Room, or make arrangements to have their luggage put on the proper trains or ships.
Immigrants going directly to New York City didn’t have to worry about train tickets. Once they were free to go, they would gather in the “New York Room,” and then board a ferry to Manhattan.
It was a little different for the train passengers. Each railroad company had a holding area for its immigrant passengers in the railroad ticket office lobby or a nearby waiting room. The railroad company agents would ferry their westbound and southbound customers to a railroad terminal at Jersey City or Hoboken, New Jersey. Immigrants would board the proper trains here.
Immigrants going by ship to other East Coast cities would wait for their rides elsewhere. They would take a small boat to the ship that would take them to the East Coast port they wanted to reach.
Roughly one-third of the immigrants went through the door out of the New York Room marked “PUSH TO NEW YORK”, and took the Ellis Island ferryboat to Lower Manhattan. Many of these people would settle in New York City. Immigrants with train tickets to towns in New England or upstate New York would also go to the “New York Room,” take the ferryboat to Manhattan and get on the proper trains in Manhattan.
Friends and relatives could meet incoming immigrants at Ellis Island and escort them out. Agents on Ellis Island would question these people closely to make sure they were the people they said they were, and that they could prove their ties of blood or friendship to the people they came for. The immigrants themselves had to verify the callers were their friends or relatives before the immigration agents would let them go in their company.
Unaccompanied men could leave Ellis Island on their own, without having to have anyone come for them or without having to have any telegram confirm they had a place to go to.
Likewise, families with men, and groups of people traveling together with men in the groups could leave Ellis Island on their own. Ellis Island agents figured they ought to be able to protect themselves.
Lower East Side, Manhattan Island, New York City. This area was a magnet for Jewish immigrants from Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. It was a ferry boat ride away from Ellis Island.
It was different for women and children who had no men accompanying them. Immigration officials temporarily detained these women and children and insisted they contact spouses, relatives, or friends by mail or telegraph. They insisted on the spouses, relatives, or friends verifying they were coming for their women and children, or that they were sending train tickets and money, or instructions on how to get to the places they needed to get to if the women and children had enough money.
Immigration agents tagged children younger than 15 who were unaccompanied by adults with linen tags spelling out the name and address of the relative they were going to. They also telegraphed the relatives so they would be at the train station to meet the children. Only then would they release these children to the railroad company agents.
Immigration agents also temporarily detained unaccompanied women and children going to New York City or someplace nearby. They would have to wait for husband or fiancé or relative or friend to call for them at Ellis Island. (33)
Sometimes charitable organizations agreed to sponsor single women immigrants. Catholic nuns, Protestant ministers, Jewish groups, and others agreed to sponsor these women and ensure they found housing and work that was not illegal or immoral. (Sometimes these organizations even put up cash bonds certifying that these women would not become public charges.) These groups daily had to account for these girls and women to the authorities at Ellis Island. (34)
If a man coming to pick up a woman at Ellis Island said he was her husband, she had to identify him and they had to have proof of marriage. If they didn’t have such proof, then the officials would have the man and woman undergo a civil marriage ceremony at Ellis Island. If a man coming to pick up a woman at Ellis Island said he was her fiancé, then the officials would have the man and woman undergo a civil marriage ceremony at Ellis Island as well. Of course, the woman would have to consent to undergo this ritual with this man!
The authors of these policies did not intend to demean women or demean religious marriages. Immigration officials feared for the safety of women, because there were many predators in organized crime able and willing to steer them into prostitution or other degrading situations against their wills. There were also many unorganized swine who would sexually abuse unaccompanied foreign women and girls if they thought they could get away with it.
A woman could refuse to go with a purported fiancé or relative and the immigration agents would be there to protect her. Many times women needed such protection.
And as for the religious issue? Fiancés and fiancées who were religious could still refrain from consummating their marriage (having sex with each other) until they married according to the laws of their religion, in front of a priest, rabbi, or minister. Immigration officers by and large were members of religions themselves. They just wanted to make sure alleged fiances were who they said they were.
Frank Martocci, an Italian immigrant who was an interpreter and an inspector at Ellis Island from the 1890s until the 1930s, said, “We could not let a woman with her children out on the streets looking for her husband. This also applied to all alien females, minors, and others who did not have money, but were otherwise eligible and merely waiting for friends or relatives.” (35)
The immigration officials could care less about the alleged equality of the sexes. (Remember, American women didn’t have the right to vote in all states until 1920.) Their job was to protect immigrants as well as screen them. They knew it was easier for the unscrupulous to victimize immigrant women than immigrant men, so they put appropriate safeguards in place to protect them.
There was an area where immigration agents questioned callers coming for immigrants to verify they were legitimate. Immigrants, usually women and children, waited in a large waiting room nearby. When the immigration officials were sure the callers were telling the truth, they would bring out the immigrants they called for. The caller, most often an immigrant husband who had come to America alone some time earlier and had worked to bring his family over, would meet his wife and children at this post when the agents brought them out of the waiting room. Engaged couples would also reunite there. As you can imagine, the overflow of joy at these reunitings brought laughter, tears, and emotional hugs and kisses. The area naturally got the nickname “Kissing Post” or “Kissing Gate.”
Now you have an idea of how it was to be an immigrant going through Ellis Island.
Now you also have an idea of how American leaders and their subordinates did their jobs in an era when American leaders were not ashamed to put America first … in an era when the public demanded such loyalty to our nation and people. Pray to God for the return of this type of public spirit, and do what you can to further it in your circles!
(to be continued ….)
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
END NOTES
13. The “29 Questions” come from the form “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival.”
14. The law in question is the Act of February 5, 1917 (39 Statutes at Large 874-898).
15. The observer’s comments are in the Unrau study (pages 548-549).
16. La Guardia’s comments come from his book The Making of an Insurgent (pages 66-67).
17. The sources for William Williams’ quotes on his unofficial $25 per immigrant yardstick are his Annual Report dated 8/16/1909 in his papers (New York City Public Library) and the Unrau study (pages 251-252).
18. The source of Baker’s comment is Edward Corsi’s book In the Shadow of Liberty (pages 123-124).
19. The source of the observer’s comments is Frederick Haskin’s 1913 book The Immigrant: An Asset and a Liability (pages 75-81). The excerpt appeared in the Unrau study (page 551).
20. The source of Tito’s claim he almost emigrated to America is Louis Adamic’s book The Eagle and the Roots (pages 109-110).
21. Information on the wireless assisted arrest of Dr. Crippen comes from Crimes of the 20th Century (page 53). People in Crippen’s family tree in America and some independent forensic scientists recently cast doubt on his guilt. They blamed sloppy British police work and prosecutor work for his conviction and hanging. This book doesn’t speculate on his guilt or innocence, but points out the communication technology was available to have him nabbed. And the wireless was also available to authorities to check on travelers to America or receive warnings about them.
22. Corsi’s accounts of Mussolini come from his book In the Shadow of Liberty (pages 28 and 229).
23. Williams’ remarks about tracking European criminals and declining to short-cut the extradition process come from page 19 of his 1912 report “Ellis Island: Its Organization and Some of Its Work.” The excerpt appeared in the Unrau study (page 507).
24. Williams’ comments about crime come from his 1912 Annual Report. The excerpt appeared in the Unrau study (page 57).
British officials today still demand the extradition of Irish patriots who are using the same methods in Ulster as the American patriots did to fight British rule. After the jihadist London bombings of 2005, British officials reached out to Moslems in their country, including the sizeable Moslem criminal and terrorist element. British officials never made that sort of gesture to the Irish under their control.
25. Statistics on excluded aliens comes from the Unrau study. I did some math to come up with the totals.
26. Watchorn’s detention statistics come from the Unrau study (page 239).
27. Cowen’s comments on inspector workload are in the Unrau study (pages 247-248).
28. “Summary of Labor Force Report by Special Immigrant Inspector Roger O’Donnell” dated 4/15/1909 is the source for O’Donnell’s remarks. This report is in the Unrau study (pages 397-399).
29. Williams’ comments about boards of special inquiry come from pages 32, 35, and 36 of his 1912 report “Ellis Island: Its Organization and Some of Its Work.” The pages appeared in the Unrau study (pages 520, 523, and 524).
30. Watchorn’s statistics come from the Unrau study (page 239).
31. Other information on boards of special inquiry comes from the Unrau study (pages 270, 334, 522). Page 334 is a reprint of Page 23 of Williams’ 1903 report “Organization of the U.S. Immigration Station at Ellis Island, New York.”
32. Watchorn’s statistics on detentions and other statistics come from the Unrau study (pages 239 and 533). Page 533 is a reprint of Page 45 of Williams’ 1912 report “Ellis Island: Its Organization and Some of Its Work.”
33. Information about agents detaining unaccompanied women and children for their own safety comes from Williams’ 1903 report “Organization of the U.S. Immigration Station at Ellis Island, New York” (page 21). The page appeared in the Unrau study (page 332).
34. Information about the charitable organization’s aid of single female immigrants comes from Williams’ 1903 report “Organization of the U.S. Immigration Station at Ellis Island, New York” (page 30). The page appeared in the Unrau study (page 341). Charity works better when it is private and personal than when it is governmental and impersonal.
35. Martocci’s quote comes from In the Shadow of Liberty (page 77).
