American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [121]
The stricter enforcement of immigration law may not have seriously affected German immigrants, but there was no denying that Williams was now turning away more immigrants at Ellis Island. He believed that Robert Watchorn, with the approval and oversight of Secretary Oscar Straus, had kept the gates at Ellis Island wide open.
Between 1907 and 1909, less than 1 percent of all immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were rejected. Williams had set out to rectify that situation, and the numbers demonstrate his success. In 1910, Williams’s first full year back at Ellis Island, the rate of exclusions doubled to 1.8 percent of all arrivals. That would decrease over the next three years but never dip below 1 percent, as it had under Watchorn. Immigrants faced tougher scrutiny at Ellis Island than they would at any other major inspection station in the country, with the exception of those along the Mexican and Canadian borders.
Nor was it just a question of immigrants having a tougher time getting through inspection at Ellis Island. Those already landed could be deported within three years of their arrival if found to be public charges, prostitutes, criminals, anarchists, feebleminded, or any one of a number of categories that would have labeled them as undesirable under the law. Such deportations were steadily increasing over the years and continued under Williams. During Williams’s second tenure at Ellis Island, over 6,000 immigrants found themselves returned to Ellis Island and deported back to their homelands.
Even with the stricter enforcement of the law and increasing number of deportations and in spite of Williams’s rhetoric about undesirable immigrants, over 98 percent of all who arrived at Ellis Island were eventually admitted. This speaks to the powerful legal, political, social, economic, and ideological consensus that allowed America to accept millions of new immigrants despite the grumbling of those made uneasy by the disruptions that this human wave brought. Every exclusion was a personal tragedy; in 1910 there were over 14,000 such tragedies at Ellis Island. However, when compared to the hundreds of thousands who easily passed through, it is hard to describe Ellis Island as a restrictionist nightmare.
What is not fully known is how many potential immigrants were stopped at European ports from emigrating in the first place. Steamship companies set up their own inspection process there to weed out individuals they felt were not qualified to land according to American immigration law. If someone did not pass that inspection, he or she could not purchase a ticket. It was simple economics for the steamship companies, who did not want to incur fines and the added expense of transporting rejected immigrants back to Europe. In many ways, that inspection was much tougher and more intrusive than the one immigrants experienced at Ellis Island.
It is hard to come by official figures on the number of people rejected by steamship officials at European ports. Journalist Broughton Brandenburg investigated the conditions of immigrants on both sides of the Atlantic and found that at the ports of Hamburg, Bremen, Liverpool, Naples, and Fiume, from which most American immigrants sailed, some 68,000 people were refused steamship tickets during 1906. At Naples, roughly 6 percent of immigrants seeking passage to America were turned away in 1906. The following year, Robert Watchorn estimated that a total of 65,000 immigrants were barred at all European ports.
For some immigrants, their obstacle course to the New World began even earlier. Russians had to first make their way to German ports like Hamburg or Bremen. Since most of these Russians were Jews, German officials were not happy about having them tramp through their lands, although they were more than willing to have German