[On January 1,
1892, Ellis
Island immigration station opened in New York Harbor. Nearly 500,000
immigrants came through the station in its first year, and the rest is history.
Very complex history, though, and so for Ellis’s 125th anniversary
I’ll analyze five contexts for the station and the immigration stories to which
it connects. Leading up to a special weekend post on 21st century
immigration!]
What didn’t
change when Ellis replaced New York’s prior immigration station, and what did.
It isn’t nearly
as present in our collective memories as Ellis Island—for some of the reasons
I’ll get to in my third paragraph, along with the simpler fact that it’s located
further in our past, and moreover in an era with far fewer photographs and no
newsreels—but New York City’s
Castle Garden was the nation’s first official “immigration station.”
Located in The Battery, the park and fortified
area at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan, the facilities and grounds
known as Castle Garden were leased to the New York State Commissioners of
Emigration in 1855, and opened as an official arrival point for immigrants in
that same year. (Ships carrying immigrants had been docking in the area since
at least 1820, but in a more local and somewhat less catalogued way.) By the
time Ellis Island opened in 1892, more than 11 million immigrants had come
through Castle Garden, and the excellent CastleGarden.org website
features a searchable database of ships and passengers from across those
decades (again, prior to 1855 less information was consistently recorded about
those arrivals).
We might
remember Ellis Island more fully than we do Castle Garden, but the truth, as I’ll
come back to in the week’s final post on immigration myths, is that the process
of arrival for those immigrants who began coming through Ellis in 1892 was very
similar to what had been the case for Castle Garden arrivals. Since the only national
immigration laws as of 1892 were those excluding Chinese arrivals,
virtually all of whom came to the West Coast, the vast majority of Ellis
arrivals were no more subject to legal categorization than had been Castle
ones. Instead, the process was defined by two steps: principally, recording the
arrivals’ names, countries of origin, and American destinations (information
that had been gathered in at least partial form since 1820); and secondarily,
assessing arrivals for such potential problems as communicable diseases and
status as criminal fugitives. The questions and procedures for both the
information gathering and the risk assessments had evolved throughout the
decades at Castle Garden, and would likewise evolve at Ellis, culminating in
the list of 29 questions about which I’ll write later in the week. But
nonetheless those procedures represent much more of a continuity than a change
between the Castle and Ellis stations.
If many of the
on-the-ground realities connected the two stations, however, the collective
images of them were far different—and not only in our 21st century collective
memories, but in Ellis’ own era as well. It’s fair to say that images of immigration
had become more nationally prominent overall by 1892, thanks to a variety of
factors: the 1886
opening of the Statue of Liberty, which of course would become closely
associated with its island neighbor Ellis; the fears
and debates that produced the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and all of its
aftermaths; the ongoing, largest (by propotion of population) wave of immigration
in the nation’s history; and more. But it’s also important to note that
prior to the Exclusion Act, and the subsequent
Supreme Court decisions which upheld Congress’s ability to pass such an
immigration law, immigration had been considered and treated as far more of a
local or regional question than a national one. So if Ellis didn’t necessarily
do much that Castle Garden hadn’t done before it, it nonetheless entered into—and
very fully and enduringly came to embody—a new moment in our images and
narratives of immigration. All the more reason to spend a week AmericanStudying
it, I’d say!
Next
IslandStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Ellis Island responses or contexts?
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