United States of America

Immigration

Ellis island and the start of immigration

Ellis Island, at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York Harbor, is the location of what was at one time the main entry facility for immigrants entering the United States; the facility operated from January 1, 1892 until November 12, 1954. It is owned by the Federal government and is now part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, under the jurisdiction of the US National Park Service. It is situated in Jersey City, New Jersey and New York City.

Ellis Island was the subject of a border dispute between New York State and New Jersey (see below). According to the United States Census Bureau, the island, which was largely artificially created through landfill, has an official land area of 129,619 square meters, or 32 acres, more than 83 percent of which lies in the city of Jersey City. The natural portion of the island, lying in New York City, is 21,458 square meters (5.3 acres), and is completely surrounded by the artificially created portion. For New York State tax purposes it is assessed as Manhattan Block 1, Lot 201. Since 1998, it also has a tax number assigned by the state of New Jersey.

Originally called Little Oyster Island, Ellis Island acquired its name from Samuel Ellis, a colonial New Yorker, possibly from Wales.

TO BE SOLD

By Samuel Ellis, no. 1, Greenwich Street, at the north river near the Jewish Market, That pleasant situated Island called Oyster Island, lying in New Bay, near Powle’s Hook, together with all its improvements which are considerable; also, two lots of ground, one at the lower end of Queen street, joining Luke’s wharf, the other in Greenwich street, between Petition and Dey streets, and a parcel of spars for masts, yards, brooms, bowsprits, & c. and a parcel of timber fit for pumps and buildings of docks; and a few barrels of excellent shad and herrings, and others of an inferior quality fit for shipping; and a few thousand of red herring of his own curing, that he will warrant to keep good in carrying to any part of the world, and a quantity of twine which he sell very low, which is the best sort of twine, for tyke nets. Also a large Pleasure Sleigh, almost new.

—Samuel Ellis advertising in London New York-Packet, 1778

The federal immigration station opened on January 1, 1892 and was closed on November 12, 1954, but not before 12 million immigrants were inspected there by the US Bureau of Immigration (Immigration and Naturalization Service). There are unsubstantiated estimates for immigrants processed there as high as 20 million. In the 35 years before Ellis Island opened, over 8 million immigrants had been processed locally by New York State officials at Castle Garden Immigration Depot in Manhattan.

Those with visible health problems or diseases were sent home or held in the island's hospital facilities for long periods of time. Then they were asked 29 questions including name, occupation, and the amount of money they carried with them. Generally those immigrants who were approved spent from three to five hours at Ellis Island. However more than three thousand would-be immigrants died on Ellis Island while being held in the hospital facilities. Some unskilled workers and immigrants were rejected outright because they were considered 'likely to become a public charge.' About 2 percent were denied admission to the U.S. and sent back to their countries of origin for reasons such as chronic contagious disease, criminal background, or insanity.

Writer Louis Adamic came to America from Slovenia in southeastern Europe in 1913. Adamic described the night he spent on Ellis Island. He and many other immigrants slept on bunk beds in a huge hall. Lacking a warm blanket, the young man 'shivered, sleepless, all night, listening to snores' and dreams 'in perhaps a dozen different languages'.

As with all historic areas administered by the National Park Service, Ellis Island, along with Statue of Liberty, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966.

Today Ellis Island houses a museum reachable by ferry from Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey and from the southern tip of Manhattan in New York City. The Statue of Liberty, sometimes thought to be on Ellis Island because of its symbolism as a welcome to immigrants, is actually on nearby Liberty Island, which is about 1/2 mile to the south.

Ellis island was also known as 'The Island of Tears' or 'Heartbreak Island' because of the 2% who were not admitted after the long transatlantic voyage.

The following is a list of the station's commissioners:

1. 1890-1893 Colonel John B. Weber
2. 1893-1897 Dr. Joseph H. Senner
3. 1897-1902 Thomas Fitchie
4. 1902-1905 William C. Williams
5. 1905-1909 Robert Watchorn
6. 1909-1913 William C. Williams
7. 1914-1919 Dr. Frederic C. Howe
8. 1920-1921 Frederick A. Wallis
9. 1921-1923 Robert E. Tod
10. 1923-1926 Henry C. Curran
11. 1926-1931 Benjamin M. Day
12. 1931-1934 Edward Corsi
13. 1934-1940 Rudolph Reimer
14. 1940-1942 Byron H. Uhl
15. 1942-1949 W. Frank Watkins
16. 1949-1954 Edward J. Shaughnessy

Other notable officials at Ellis Island included Edward F. McSweeney (assistant commissioner), Joseph Murray (assistant commissioner), Dr. George Stoner (chief surgeon), Augustus Frederick Sherman (chief clerk), Dr. Victor Heiser (surgeon), Thomas W. Salmon (surgeon), Howard Knox (surgeon), Peter Mikolainis (interpreter), Maud Mosher (matron), Fiorello H. La Guardia (interpreter), and Philip Cowen (immigrant inspector).

Prominent amongst the missionaries and immigrant aid workers were Rev. Michael J. Henry and Rev. Anthony J. Grogan (Irish Catholics), Rev. Gaspare Moretto (Italian Catholic), Alma E. Mathews (Methodist), Rev. Georg Doring (German Lutheran), Rev. Reuben Breed (Episcopalian), Michael Lodsin (Baptist), Brigadier Thomas Johnson (Salvation Army), Ludmila K. Foxlee (YWCA), Athena Marmaroff (Women's Christian Temperance Union), Alexander Harkavy (HIAS), Cecilia Greenstone and Cecilia Razovsky (National Council of Jewish Women).

Noted entertainers that performed for detained aliens and US and allied servicemen at the island included Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Enrico Caruso, Rudy Vallee, Jimmy Durante, Bob Hope, and Lionel Hampton and his orchestra.

Immigration

More than 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. The first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island was Annie Moore, a 15-year-old girl from County Cork, Ireland, on January 1, 1892. She and her two brothers were coming to America to meet their parents, who had moved to New York two years prior. She received a greeting from officials and a $10.00 gold piece. The last person to pass through Ellis Island was a Norwegian merchant seaman by the name of Arne Peterssen in 1954. After 1924 when the National Origins Act was passed, the only immigrants to pass through there were displaced persons or war refugees. Today, over 100 million Americans can trace their ancestry to the immigrants who first arrived in America through the island before dispersing to points all over the country.

An inaccurate myth persists that government officials on Ellis Island compelled immigrants to take new names against their wishes. In fact, no historical records bear this out. Federal immigration inspectors were under strict bureaucratic supervision and were more interested in preventing inadmissible aliens from entering the country (which they were held accountable for) rather than assisting them in trivial personal matters such as altering their names. In addition, the inspectors used the passenger lists given them by the steamship companies to process each foreigner. These were the sole immigration records for entering the country and were prepared not by the U.S. Bureau of Immigration but by steamship companies such as the Cunard Line, the White Star Line (which owned the Titanic), the North German Lloyd Line, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, the Italian Steam Navigation Company, the Red Star Line, the Holland America Line, the Austro-American Line, and so forth.

Ellis Island is a place of names. Here millions of immigrants called out theirs for the first time - proud names, long names, names that would twist the tongue - before they stepped ashore onto America's soil. To most, Ellis Island was an Isle of Hope, a brief stopping point on the way to a better life. To an unfortunate few, it became an Isle of Tears, a place of detention and possible rejection.

The need for an immigration depot was first realized in 1847 when a severe potato famine in Ireland sent thousands of starving immigrants streaming into New England and New York. As immigration to the United States increased, state and federal governments sought a way to regulate the flow. Along with their bundled possessions newcomers to America brought skilled hands and able bodies. Some saw this as a boon to the work force and economy of the nation. Others saw immigrants as merely hungry mouths and charity cases which would drain the U. S. Treasury.

In the 1880's Congress drafted a flurry of legislation - laws that became benchmarks against which an immigrant was measured during the inspection progress. The first general Federal Immigration Law denied entrance to 'any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.' In 1891 this law was expanded to include the expulsion of paupers, prostitutes, polygamists, or 'persons suffering from a loath-some or a dangerous contagious disease.' While these laws were meant to protect the immigrant as well as the American citizen, they had little effect in deterring swindlers, runners, and labor brokers from exploiting new arrivals after their arrival. In 1890 the federal government began construction of a new depot - preferably on an island site, where an immigrant could be protected, guided, and if needed, easily detained.

Tiny Ellis Island was selected even though the surrounding waters were too shallow to dock boats of any draft there. Workers doubled the island's size by using ballast from incoming ships as landfill. A ferry slip was dredged and on New Year's Day of 1892, fifteen-year-old Annie Moore from County Cork, Ireland became the first immigrant to enter the Ellis Island station.

Ellis Island circa 1905. Ferry boats shuttled the immigrants from steamships directly to Ellis Island's Main Registry Building

Despite initial praise, the station did not age well. Five years and 1.5 million immigrants later the depot showed signs of hard use and disrepair. In 1897 a fire originating in the furnace room caused the depot to burn to the ground. No one was injured, but a large number of immigration records were lost, pressuring the federal government to rebuild the depot with fireproof materials. The new station was designed to process only 500,000 immigrants annually because officials assumed the facilities would be more than adequate. No one could have guessed at the huge number of immigrants that were about to knock on America's door.

On the first day of operation in 1900, 2,251 people were inspected on Ellis Island - immigrants 'ranging in age from three months to three score and ten.' In just six years, however, the number increased from 389,000 in 1901 to over 1 million in 1907, America's peak immigration year.

When the great steamships of the early 20th century sailed into New York Harbor, the faces of a thousand nations were on board. There were Russian Jews, Irish farmers, Greeks in kilts and slippers, Italians with sharp moustaches, Cossacks with fierce swords, English in short knickers, and Arabs in long robes. The old world lay behind them. Ahead was a new life. Gone were the monarchies and kings, the systems of caste and peasantry, of famine and poverty. But also left behind were friends and family, as well as tradition and customs generations old.

As anchors slid into the silt and whistles blew, this multitude clambered up from the steerage decks to imprint on their minds forever their first glimpse of America. In the shadow of all the activity of the tugboats and dockhands, were the red brick buildings of Ellis Island. The largest building rose over 140 feet into the air. This was the building where five thousand people a day were processed. Men usually emigrated first, to find jobs and housing. Later they would send for their wives, children, and parents as part of the largest mass movement of people in world history. Close to 60 million people sought new opportunities during the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the hundred years previous to 1924, when the country's open-door abruptly shut, 34 million immigrants landed on American soil.

The earliest influx of new arrivals started in the mid 1840's when Europe felt the throes of a bitter famine. This first wave of immigrants - primarily Northern Europeans from Ireland, England, Germany and Scandinavia - fled starvation, feudal governments, and the social upheaval brought about by the Industrial Revolution. A second wave of immigrants streamed out of Southern and Eastern Europe from 1890-1924. Along with fleeing the burden of high taxes, poverty, and overpopulation, these 'new' immigrants were also victims of oppression and religious persecution. Jews living in Romania, Russia, and Poland were being driven from their homes by a series of pogroms, riots and laws enforced by a Czarist government. Similarly the Croats and Serbs in Hungary, the Poles in Germany, and the Irish persecuted under English rule all saw America as a land of freedom and opportunity.

By the 1890's steam-powered ships replaced sailing vessels and cut the time of an Atlantic crossing from three months to two weeks. Large shipping lines such as Cunard and White Star competed for the immigrants who were seen as a profitable cargo. The steamships could accommodate as many as 2,000 passengers in steerage, so-called because it was located on the lower decks where the steering mechanism of the sailing ships had once been housed. These long narrow compartments were divided into separate dormitories for single men, single women, and families. Jammed with metal-framed berths three bunks high, the air in steerage became rank with the heavy odor of spoiled food, sea-sickness, and unwashed bodies. There was little privacy, and the lack of adequate toilet facilities made it difficult to keep clean. A Russian Jew recalled that ' the atmosphere was so thick and dense with smoke and bodily odors that your head itched, and when you scratched your head - you got lice on your hands.'

By 1910 many ships had replaced steerage with four- and six-berth third class cabins. These vessels served meals in dining rooms with long tables set with dishes and utensils. However, on many of the older ships, passengers still ate meals from a tin mess kit while sitting on deck or in the hot, cramped steerage dormitories. The Italian lines served pasta and wine, and many shipping lines provided kosher food for Jewish passengers, but not all ships catered to ethnic or religious tastes. Cases of malnutrition were not uncommon. Standard fare consisted of potatoes, soup, eggs, fish, stringy meat, prunes - and whatever food the immigrants carried from home.

By the time the steamships sailed into New York, the first and second class passengers had already been inspected and cleared to land by immigration officials who came aboard. However, steerage passengers were not afforded such privileges and their first steps on the mainland were brief. They were directed helter-skelter onto ferries which shuttled them to Ellis Island. These vessels were little better than open air barges, freezing in the winter, sweltering hot in summer, and lacking toilet facilities and lifesaving equipment. Deaths caused by exposure to cold were not uncommon. A Public Health official estimated that of the children suffering from measles when they arrived, 30% died because of their trip across the harbor. On busy days the immigrants were imprisoned on these vessels for hours while they waited to disembark and be ferried to Ellis Island. Sometimes new arrivals had to wait in steerage for days, prolonging the miserable journey.

or many immigrants beginning of the 20 century, 'American dream' and money for the ticket through the trek, the island Ellis Island - the first impression of America. It was leaving the building of this new-old American customs officials found the long-awaited - 'melting pot' - New York. Someone came to work, with the hope to return. Someone had hoped to settle in America forever, leaving from the problems and needs. People leave all that were behind, taking only the most necessary ... and memory. Perhaps they already children or grandchildren easily parted with this memory, feeling themselves above all American children. But in the eyes of these people have survived the 'old life'. In their views read only speculate, but no awareness of what will happen to them in a new home.