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Ellis Island Tour: Entrance
In 1892, when Ellis Island opened its doors, the United States was the world's oldest democracy and one of its youngest nations. Much in need of the labor, brawn and talents of newcomers, this nation of people who were born and would continue to be born elsewhere, had to devise original methods for creating citizenship. One could become an American, as is the case in most western democracies, by being born here or by blood inheritance; but one could also choose to be American.
Immigration, supervised by the states if it was regulated at all before the 1880's, provided a clear case for the necessity of a central federal power which could deal systematically and uniformly with people crossing national boundaries and with the enormous numbers of immigrants seeking to fill America's never ending demand for labor. The 1885 Alien Contract Labor law presents one example of the difficulties of enforcing legislation without federal participation. Intended to protect the wages of American laborers, this law made it a criminal offense to import aliens under any prior contract for the performance of labor or service of any kind. The law made no provision for enforcement of its terms through inspection or deportation, and the states could not enforce it.
In 1913, the Labor Department took over immigration, a recognition of the significance of immigration as a source of labor. The Justice Department, which had engaged in certain aspects of field research concerning deportations for the immigration service, took over its current control of immigration in 1940, a logical move since many of the country's immigration problems during and just before World II concerned legal issues of deportation and illegal aliens, not admission. By that date, of course, Ellis Island was also being used as a detention and deportation center, not just an immigrant admission station.
Congress passed a series of laws in this period which specified the kinds of individuals who would face deportation if they attempted to enter the United States. By 1917 the list was long. It included thirtythree classes of exclusions including: idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons, previously insane persons, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority, chronic alcoholics, paupers, professional beggars, vagrants, persons with tuberculosis, or "Loathsome or dangerous contagious disease," anyone with a physical or mental defect which might affect his ability to earn a living, those who had committed crimes involving "moral turpitude," polygamists, anarchists, ....
In 1921, Congress initiated a major turnabout in immigration control policy, which it firmly institutionalized in 1924 when, subject to nativist pressures, it imposed a ceiling on immigration and quotas for various nations. So began a major shift in United States immigration policy which initiated the period of "quantitative controls" that remains with us still. With these quantitative restrictions in place, immigration became an alien's privilege, not an alien's right.
Passports and visas also came to be required in the post 1924 restrictionist era. Increasingly, Ellis Island was used as a detention and deportation center, rather than as an admission depot.
By Professor Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Rutgers University, New Jersey
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