The lessons of Ellis Island, and why things are different today

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Did the United States have open borders in the Ellis Island years? Many people, including some critical of my recent Washington Examiner column on Donald Trump's revised immigration proposals, seem to think so. But the fact is that from the days of the early republic, government sought to require that immigrants had the capacity to support themselves and were free of communicable disease.

 

The story is ably told in Vincent Cannato's book American Passage: The History of Ellis Island. For much of the nineteenth century, state governments rather than the federal government fulfilled this function, with New York and Massachusetts leading the way with inspection stations in the ports of New York City (the famous Castle Garden) and Boston. In 1890 the federal government took over the function and, famously, opened the Ellis Island inspection station in New York harbor in 1892.

 

The Ellis Island station processed 80 percent of the immigrants who arrived between 1892 and 1924, some 12 million people in all, and barred only about 2 percent of those who arrived from entering the country, those with what were considered serious diseases and those "likely to become public charges."

 

The opening of Ellis Island coincided almost exactly with a major change in the source of immigrants, as I explained in my book Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics. Up through the 1880s, most immigrants to the United States came from northwestern Europe—the British Isles, Germany and, starting in the 1880s, Scandinavia. Starting in the 1890s, in low numbers at first due to an economic depression that began in 1893, most immigrants came from eastern and southern Europe.