American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [228]
Epilogue
“WE SHOULD NO T LET ANY ONE IN . WHEN WE CAME, the rules were you could not be a burden to the state,” eighty-threeyear-old Sophie Wolf told a reporter on a visit to Ellis Island in 1980. “There were no schools where you could learn the language.” Wolf had arrived in the United States from Germany in 1923, and for her the new immigrants of the 1980s and beyond were inferior to those of her day. Wolf and many others whose ancestors came through Ellis Island believed that late-twentieth-century immigrants were treated with greater leniency and received more help from the government than the generation that arrived at Ellis Island.
At first glance, Wolf seems to validate the recent criticism of Ellis Island for its ethnic triumphalism. Yet when she continued with her thoughts about Mexican, Vietnamese, and Cuban immigrants, her views seemed to shift. “But you’ve got to give people a chance,” she said. “You can’t send them back.” Wolf ’s conflicted response tells us a great deal about American ambivalence toward immigration.
Wolf may have believed that things were tougher for immigrants in the past than they are today, but not everyone agrees. “At the turn of the century [1900],” the National Park Service’s Richard Wells told a reporter in 1998, “America treated its immigrants far better than it does today.” Americans continue to fight over the memory of Ellis Island in the wake of another era of mass immigration.
In one of history’s many ironies, Ellis Island reopened to the public in 1990 just as the United States was witnessing its largest influx of immigrants ever, surpassing the previous record from 1907. The following year would see even greater numbers. During the 1990s, an average of just under 1 million immigrants entered each year, a trend that would continue into the new century.
However much Americans may feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of this new immigration, the total U.S. population was nearly four times larger in 1990 than it was when Ellis Island opened a century earlier. Therefore, immigration in the 1990s was not as large on a percentage basis as that of the Ellis Island years.
Much like the late nineteenth century, the demographics of immigrants in the late twentieth century were also evolving. The great migration of Europeans has largely run its course. In the 1990s, only 14 percent of immigrants came from Europe, while 22 percent came from just one country: Mexico. Another 22 percent came from the Caribbean and Central and South America, while 29 percent arrived from Asia. By 2004, the percentage of Americans who were foreign-born had risen to nearly 12 percent, from its low of 5 percent in 1960, although still below the almost 15 percent during the heyday of Ellis Island.
However, that does not include illegal or undocumented immigrants. In 2005, the government estimated that there were 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. Some have estimated that the number might be as high as 20 million.
This new wave of immigration has produced its own fearful reaction among some native-born Americans. While some discomfort has stemmed from the sheer number of immigrants as well as the fact that so many are nonwhite, much of the current debate centers on illegal immigration. First there was the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which allowed a pathway to citizenship for a few million illegal immigrants and penalized businesses for hiring undocumented workers. Then there was the fight in California in the 1990s over Proposition 187, which would have denied government benefits to illegal immigrants. Most recently, Congress failed to pass immigration reform legislation in 2007, which opponents blocked because they argued it would have given amnesty to illegal immigrants.
In this most recent debate, some conservative opponents of the bill have harkened back to the memory of Ellis Island. Former Republican state legislator