[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!]
On three examples
of particularly complex and telling types of questions on the
list of 29 that (as I wrote on Monday) were asked of immigrant arrivals to
Ellis Island.
1)
Communities: After the basic informational kinds
of questions (although some, like “What is your race?,” weren’t quite as simple
as they appear), the next group focused on the national and family communities
from which arrivals came and which they might be joining here in the U.S. To my
mind, one of the most seemingly straightforward questions from this group was
also complex and telling: “Who paid for your passage?” Fears of the importation
of forced laborers had driven immigration policy since at least California’s
controversial 1862 Anti-Coolie Act, and this question could be linked to
those concerns. Yet as I’ll highlight in item two, many turn of the 20th
century anti-immigrant narratives focused on nefarious international groups
such as “anarchists,” and the question likewise implied that such groups might
be financing immigrants sympathetic to their cause. In any case, despite being
located between two more factual questions (“What is your final destination in
America?” and “How much money do you have with you?”), this one was at least
far more loaded.
2)
Threats: Some questions, like “Who paid for your
passage?,” implicitly sought to determine if an immigrant might pose a danger
to his or her new communities. Some, like the ridiculously overt two-parter “Are
you a polygamist? Are you an anarchist?” (yes, those two comprised one of the
29 questions), did so very very explicitly; it’s difficult for me to imagine
anyone knowing enough to be aware of those terms’ meanings answering this
question in the affirmative. But to my mind the most complex and troubling of
this type was another multi-parter: “Have you been in a prison, almshouse, or
institution for the care of the insane?” Both convicted criminals (especially
political prisoners) and the demonstrably “insane” had been excluded from
immigrating since the first national immigration law, 1875’s Page
Act, so those designations, while frustratingly slippery and malleable,
weren’t new. But asking about those who had stayed in an
almshouse—those who had experienced desperate poverty, that is—did represent
an addition to these categories; or, to be exact, did link social class and
status to crime and mental health in overt and even more frustratingly exclusionary
ways.
3)
Civics: If you made it through these other
groups of questions, the last and largest group (comprising 11 of the 29
questions) focused on questions about American history and government: “Who was
the first President of America?” [BEN: Not sure anyone has occupied that
position, but I’m gonna go with either Simón
Bolívar or Beyoncé], “What is the 4th of July?,” “Who signs
bills into law?,” and so on. While some of these questions help us understand
the natonal self-image Ellis Island sought to create (especially “Which
President freed the slaves?”), I’m more interested in the existence and centrality
of this category overall. It makes sense that for someone to become a U.S.
citizen, he or she has to pass
a test featuring such historical and civic topics; but that’s after more
than a decade in the country, not upon first arrival to it. (Granted, the
citizenship test is far more extensive than was Ellis’ civics portion, but the
principle is the same.) Can and should we have expected that newcomers would
know these details? I can see both sides of that debate, but in any case this
group of questions clearly connects to broader turn of the 20th
century narratives of the
need to “Americanize” new immigrants as quickly and fully as possible.
Next
IslandStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Ellis Island responses or contexts?
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