American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [110]
A court decision could have upended the entire inspection and exclusion apparatus at Ellis Island and opened up every decision to a judicial appeal. Not wanting to risk this, Williams immediately ordered a new hearing for the four immigrants before Judge Hand could make a ruling. Witnesses appeared vowing employment for the four men, money was deposited in their name by Jewish organizations, and Williams declared himself satisfied that, especially in light of the publicity surrounding the case, the four would not become public charges. All were allowed to land and their petitions withdrawn. “We have now shown them that the immigration authorities can do full justice without the necessity of the intervention of the courts,” Williams wrote somewhat disingenuously. “What has now happened is exactly what would have occurred sooner had they not rushed to the court.”
After the resolution of the case, Secretary Charles Nagel came to Ellis Island with Elkus and Simon Wolf. In public, Nagel was supportive of his commissioner, but the visit signaled that he took the charges against Williams seriously. In private he made his displeasure known, albeit in a cautious and respectful manner. Nagel told Williams that his $25 rule—which Nagel had just a few weeks earlier approved—had already served its purpose to warn immigrants and steamship companies that the supposedly lax policies of the Watchorn years were over. He believed the rule was now “of no value, but on the contrary is calculated to give you and the Bureau and the Department trouble.”
“There is no more need for making suggestions as to the amount of money than there is for saying how short a leg must be to constitute lameness,” Nagel wrote after his visit. He was also concerned that the $25 rule was operable at Ellis Island but not at other inspection stations and would create confusion if each station created its own rules. In conclusion, he reminded Williams that “we can well afford even to err on the side of fairness and toleration.” The $25 rule appeared to be history. Though a personal victory for Hersch Skuratowski and his friends, it was no victory for Kohler and others who sought to liberalize the process at Ellis Island.
The following year, the U.S. District Court heard another habeas corpus petition challenging the detention and deportation of Vincenzo Canfora. The sixty-year-old Italian bookbinder had lived in America with his wife and six children since 1895, but he got sick and had his leg amputated below the knee. He then returned to Italy for a brief visit with his mother. Before his arrival at Ellis Island, a letter arrived from one Joseph Ruggio alerting officials to Canfora’s arrival and alleging that he had been a public charge when recovering from his amputation at Bellevue Hospital, where doctors performed the surgery for free. Upon his arrival, Canfora was ordered excluded as suffering from a physical defect that would likely make him a public charge, despite his skill as a bookbinder, his $200 in savings, and the presence in America of his family, including self-supporting children.
The judge called the deportation order against Canfora “an act of cruel injustice,” yet he ruled that he was “compelled to dismiss this writ,” since immigration laws “confer exclusive power