American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [189]
Curran dismissed the report and nothing came of its recommendations. When he arrived at Ellis Island, Curran was sympathetic to immigrants and proved willing to bend the rules on occasion. When a Hungarian girl was ordered deported because the quota had already been met, Curran noticed that she was carrying a violin and asked her to play. When she was done, Curran declared her an artist, a category that was exempt under the quotas, and she was allowed to enter.
Curran admitted that restricting immigration was the last thing on his mind when he took office, but he was soon arguing that America would be better off with fewer immigrants, or none at all—at least for a time. “Take again the intelligence, honesty and cleanliness of the average immigrant of today,” Curran warned. “Those who have served at Ellis Island for thirty years and more will tell you that he is below his predecessor of a generation ago—far below, by all three counts.” That would have been news to Americans in the 1890s who claimed that the immigration of that era was significantly inferior to what had arrived thirty years earlier.
Though this made Curran sound like William Williams, Curran’s heart was not in the job of restricting immigrants. When he received another job offer, he dropped his position at Ellis Island “like a hot cake.” “I have never seen such concentrated human sorrow and suffering as I saw at Ellis Island,” Curran later wrote. “Three years were enough.”
Congress had already reauthorized the 3 percent quota twice, but in 1924 it was ready for even stricter measures. Eventually, Congress agreed to a new quota of 2 percent of each foreign-born nationality based on the 1890 Census, with a ceiling for quota immigrants around 287,000. The rationale for using the 1890 Census instead of the 1910 Census was clear. There were far fewer Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, and Slavs in the country then. In fact, the new quotas meant that almost 85 percent of the quota allotments would go to northern Europeans. The Italian quota went from roughly 40,000 a year to 3,845; the Russian quota from about 34,000 to just 2,248 and the Greek quota went from just over 3,000 to a negligible 100.
There were even more changes. Beginning in 1925, the inspection of immigrants moved from American ports to American consulates abroad. People who wanted to come to the United States sought permission at the nearest American consulate, whose officers were tasked with inspecting the individual and making sure he or she would make a desirable immigrant. Upon successful inspection and the payment of a fee, consular officials would grant the individual a visa.
It was now the responsibility of American consulate officials to make sure potential immigrants met the monthly quota, which was now reduced to 10 percent per month of the yearly quota. This eliminated the mad midnight dash of steamships across the Narrows.
The shifting of inspection to American consulates abroad was a measure sought for many years by Americans on both sides of the immigration debate. Senator William Chandler argued as far back as 1891 that consular inspections, far from the prying eyes of the press and immigrant-aid societies, would be stricter and conducted without the intervention of friends, relatives, and politicians seeking the immigrant’s entry.
Fiorello La Guardia was also a proponent. Before his stint at