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 few posts, 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 looks 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.
EVENTS THAT LED TO THE ELLIS ISLAND PROCESS
Since the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which tied the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River, New York City was the dominant seaport of the United States. Therefore most immigrants came in steerage through New York City’s port. They simply got off the ships when they landed, and settled in New York or went elsewhere.
The first formal immigration station in New York City was at Castle Garden on Manhattan Island. New York state officials processed immigrants at Castle Garden starting in 1855 to protect immigrants from being ripped off by New York sharpies and other vermin in Gotham. However, the ongoing corruption of New York officials and other state officials in the immigrant processing business led the Feds to take over processing immigrants in the early 1890s. Federal officials started processing immigrants at the Barge Office on Manhattan Island in 1890 until Ellis Island opened for business in 1892. (After the fire destroyed the wooden structures on Ellis Island in 1897, federal agents processed immigrants at the Barge Office again until the new brick facilities on Ellis Island were ready in 1900.)
Castle Garden is the kidney-shaped building with the turret on the roof in the foreground. You can see the Statue of Liberty out in the harbor, and Ellis Island, the low island with the big building surrounded by ships, to Liberty Island’s right. Photo taken 1902.
Ellis Island and the other federal immigration stations had a more thorough mission … screening immigrants as well as protecting them. Processing of immigrants was supposed to screen out those deemed a detriment to the United States. The immigration officials proceeded on the reasonable standard that immigration should benefit the United States instead of benefiting only the immigrants.
As immigration officials learned their jobs and learned what to look for when inspecting would-be immigrants, they adjusted the inspection process to improve it.
The advance of science brought better medical techniques and public health practices. This allowed inspectors to screen out would-be immigrants with medical problems that forbade them from coming into the United States. This also allowed immigration officials to disinfect immigrants to prevent the spread of disease and allowed the immigration service’s doctors and nurses to treat and cure many sick immigrants.
The advance of science brought better communication. The “wireless” radio telegraph joined the telegraph and the telephone as a means of rapid communication. This meant immigration officials could quickly get tips on unsavory individuals trying to enter the country, so they could detain them, arrest them, and deport them.
The advance of science also advanced industry. Industrial innovations included quantifiable standards, the discipline of quality control, and time and motion studies to improve products and production. Government officials – many who came from the private sector and after a few years went back, instead of too many of the careerists of today – applied these ideas to systematically organize the processing of immigrants.
There was at least one other factor which contributed to the treatment of immigrants at Ellis Island and other immigration stations – the growing participation of reformers in public life.
Labor unions were very controversial in the 1890s. That decade saw the bloody Homestead steel strike in Pennsylvania, several miners’ strikes in the West that involved bloodshed, and the Pullman Car strike in Illinois, which escalated into a nationwide railroad workers’ strike that soldiers broke with gunfire. It wouldn’t be until Theodore Roosevelt that there was a president who was openly sympathetic with strikers when their strike was just. However, more and more people who were not manual laborers began to see the appalling conditions of many job sites and the abysmally low wages for the jobs many workers performed were unjust.
Likewise, the blatantly crooked people who ran city, state, and federal governments inspired the outrage of many people. Since the people of the late 1800s were much more prone to react to corruption than we are now, there were politicians, publishers, and others who realized they could harness this anger to make reforms. Some politicians and writers decided to become reformers on principle; others did so to further their political careers or sell more newspapers.
Some of the best reformers in that era were women. Women as a rule could not work as white-collar employees in the corporations of the time, and they were by and large discouraged from being doctors or lawyers as well. As a class, about the only women executives in the United States were Catholic nuns who ran hospitals and school systems. As a class, about the only women who could shape public opinion were writers. Novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and Helen Hunt Jackson (the author of A Century of Dishonor and Ramona) changed many people’s hearts and minds on the evils of slavery and the treatment of American Indians. Print media women Nellie Bly (who uncovered abuses at a mental institution by deliberately getting committed) and Ida Tarbell (the muckraker who wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company) had more impact than most male journalists of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Women had the right to vote in some states, but did not win the right to vote nationwide until after World War One. However, women still had the right to act. Women like Jane Addams (the foundress of Hull House in Chicago) and Mother Cabrini (a Catholic nun — an immigrant from Italy herself — foundress of many orphanages and schools) helped the poor and inspired others to do so.
More and more women became teachers, nurses, and social workers. Many of them worked with the working poor – the many families who needed Papa’s wage, Mama’s wage, and some of the children’s pennies to eke out a living. Some of the women in these professions agitated for government officials to ensure the working poor got more decent treatment. The work of these women aided the work of some men of the day in trying to put government power to use to ensure fairer treatment for people.
The desire of many Americans for more humanitarian use of authority aided the people who processed immigrants at Ellis Island and elsewhere in doing their jobs more efficiently and humanely.