American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [17]
The job of regulating immigration was left to states like Massachusetts and New York, which passed laws continuing colonial policies restricting the immigration of criminals, paupers, or those with contagious diseases. States charged ship owners a head tax for each immigrant to pay for the care of poor and sick immigrants and required the posting of a bond for those immigrants deemed likely to become public charges. Although state laws would foreshadow the future of federal immigration regulation, they were weakly enforced, and few immigrants were excluded.
It would be up to private individuals and organizations to protect immigrants from abuse. Ethnic solidarity prompted the creation of immigrant aid societies. New York’s Irish already had some success in this endeavor, forming the Irish Emigrant Society in 1841 to “afford advice, information, aid and protection, to emigrants from Ireland, and generally to promote their welfare.” In 1847, it teamed up with the German Society and lobbied New York State to create the Board of Commissioners of Emigration, which consisted of the mayors of New York and Brooklyn, the heads of the German and Irish Emigrant Societies, and six others appointed by the governor.
A head tax of $1 would be assessed on each immigrant, to be collected by the board. With the money, the board opened the Emigrant Hospital and Refuge on Ward’s Island to care for sick immigrants. By 1854, the board was caring for over 2,500 immigrant patients.
The timing of the idea could not have been better. In 1847, the potato famine in Ireland had begun to drive out large numbers of Irish. For the next few years, poor Irish refugees, fleeing starvation and death, flooded American ports. Nearly 3 million immigrants landed in the United States from 1845 to 1854. Many of them ended up in New York City. Between 1840 and 1850, Manhattan’s population increased by 65 percent; by 1855 over one-half of the city’s 629,904 residents were immigrants and over one-quarter of New Yorkers hailed from Ireland.
If the Board of Commissioners was going to be successful in protecting this flood of immigrants from the predations of runners, it would need its own reception center for new arrivals, a place where immigrants would be processed, their needs met, and their interests protected. For this purpose, in April 1855, the board chose Castle Garden as its immigration depot.
The Board of Commissioners laid out the major benefits of Castle Garden. First and foremost, it would allow for a quicker and easier landing for immigrants and free them from the clutches of immigrant runners, allowing them to land “without having their means impaired, their morals corrupted, and probably their persons diseased.” The board would also begin keeping track of the numbers of immigrants arriving and where they were heading.
The altruism of the board and its interest in the welfare of immigrants was genuine. Not surprisingly, it ran into a good deal of resistance to its idea of converting what had formerly been the city’s premier music hall into an immigration-processing station. City officials were leery of the idea. This would be a state-run program—generating lots of money through the head tax—right in their backyard, and all local officials would get were two seats on the ten-person board.
Wealthy New Yorkers and businessmen in the city’s First Ward also opposed the plan, fearing that an immigrant depot in their neighborhood would cause a decline in property values. They worried that immigrants would bring “pestilential and disagreeable odors” that would blow into the windows of respectable homes in the summertime. Many had