American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [111]
These cases show that while a noncitizen living in the United States would be covered by constitutional protections, noncitizens stopped at the gates of Ellis Island were not. This was upheld in a 1905 Supreme Court decision dealing with the due process rights of a Chinese-American named Ju Toy. Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that at stations like Ellis Island, an immigrant, “although physically within our boundaries, is to be regarded as if he had been stopped at the limit of our jurisdiction and kept there while his right to enter was under debate.”
In essence, the Court created a legal fiction that Ellis Island was not part of the United States. Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island may have thought they were on American soil, but by law they had not technically crossed the border until they were officially declared “free to land” by officials. Ellis Island had become the nation’s premier border; few immigrants standing in the Great Hall would have realized that, in the eyes of the courts, they were still on the wrong side of that border.
This peculiar legal situation brought up another issue. Is a child born to an immigrant woman detained at the hospital at Ellis Island and not yet legally admitted to the country, an American citizen? According to the Fourteenth Amendment, it would appear that the child would be. In granting citizenship to freed slaves, that amendment defined citizens as “persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Hence the idea of birthright citizenship, that birth on American soil automatically conferred U.S. citizenship.
However, the Department of Commerce and Labor issued a legal memorandum stating that such a child would not receive automatic citizenship solely by being born at Ellis Island or any other inspection facility, if the mother had not yet been legally admitted to the country. Focusing on the words “subject to the jurisdiction,” officials argued that although the mother had offered her allegiance to the United States by attempting to enter the country, “her offer has been refused and she does not acquire even a momentary residence.”
Such rulings, combined with Supreme Court precedents, would create a legal twilight zone around Ellis Island where immigrants had the potential for being trapped in limbo, having forsaken their native country and been rejected by their desired adoptive country. The creation of this legal fiction would pose challenges to American law, national security, and concepts of human rights for decades to come.
D ESPITE THE SETBACKS, WILLIAMS would not completely give up on his monetary test. In March 1910, he was still announcing that “immigrants will not be allowed to land without funds adequate for their support until such time as they are likely to find employment.” He did not mention any specific dollar amount, but referred people to his earlier memo laying out the $25 rule. Williams was nothing if not stubborn. However, he needed to find other tools with which to weed out undesirable immigrants. Now officials began to focus more closely on immigrants who possessed “poor physiques” or were suffering from “low vitality.”
These supposedly weak and listless new immigrants would never make it in industrial America. Their lack of strength would mean unemployment and poverty. Some Americans believed that the poor physiques and low vitality of immigrants indicated a genetic disposition, not caused by environment or circumstances. Those genes would be passed down to their children and grandchildren, lowering the overall vitality and strength of the American