American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [21]
Despite Coxe’s florid rhetoric, most people were trying to find a way to reconcile a vision of America as a refuge for immigrants with a desire to accept only desirable newcomers. The Troy Times welcomed “the intelligent, industrious, and honest foreigners who come here to establish homes,” but wanted “the highest and strongest barriers . . . raised” for the “worthless human rubbish.” “What we need,” argued the Minneapolis Tribune, “is the inspection and sifting of intending immigrants.” Such a system, the New York Commercial Advertiser believed, would allow the nation to “defend itself against undesirable additions to its population without crowding out immigrants who are qualified to become good citizens.”
By the late 1880s, changes in the way America handled immigration were inevitable. Castle Garden had become an anachronism, a quaint relic of a disappearing world. It was a state-run institution trying to deal with a nationwide problem. It was an institution run by machine politicians and private citizens looking to protect the interests of immigrants, not disinterested professionals looking out for the greater good of society. It was a nineteenth-century solution to a (soon to be) twentieth-century problem.
Castle Garden officials would find themselves under nearly continuous assault. Where Isaiah Rynders and his immigrant runners failed years before, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Treasury Department, the governor of New York, and crusading journalists succeeded.
The Supreme Court struck the first blow in 1875 with Henderson v. Mayor of New York, which declared that state laws requiring the immigrant head taxes were unconstitutional because they usurped Congress’s constitutional powers to regulate immigration. The Constitution is fairly oblique in its references to immigration, and Congress had shown little desire to exercise that right previously. A decade after the victory of the Union Army at Appomattox, the Supreme Court was unsympathetic to the idea of states’ rights. “The laws which govern the right to land passengers in the United States from other countries ought to be the same in New York, Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco,” the Court declared.
Shortly after the decision, Congress responded by passing the first federal law restricting immigration. The Immigration Act of 1875 banned prostitutes, criminals, and Chinese laborers. However, it was an odd law. Though Congress declared its authority to exclude immigrants, the federal government showed little interest in enforcing the new law and left the task to the states. Back in New York, the Board of Commissioners at Castle Garden, without the revenue from the immigrant head tax, was in debt and could no longer take care of immigrants. For the next six years, Congress ignored pleas from New York State for financial help to enforce federal law. Frustrated, the Board of Commissioners threatened to close down Castle Garden.
It was not until 1882 that Congress again acted on immigration when it passed two important pieces of legislation. The first placed the power to regulate immigrants more firmly in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Department. As some 476,000 immigrants passed through Castle Garden that year, the Immigration Act of 1882 imposed a head tax of 50 cents on all incoming immigrants. More importantly, it expanded the exclusionary categories to include any “convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Congress was expanding the classifications of undesirable immigrants, and the list would soon grow even longer in years to come.
That same year, Congress passed another law with a different intent. The Chinese Exclusion Act barred the entry of nearly all Chinese