American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [229]
“Why was an ‘Ellis Island’ approach good for the goose of American history, but not for the gander of the present day,” Towery asked. Ellis Island immigrants, he continued, had to do more than “put two feet on American soil before earning their status.” Why not demand the same for new immigrants? For Towery, Ellis Island regains its former sievelike quality, which weeded out the desirable from the undesirable, and he wonders why we cannot return to such a process in the twenty-first century.
In a similar vein, Congressman Mike Pence, a Republican from Indiana, crafted his own immigration reform plan that included something called “Ellis Island centers.” Such centers would be located in NAFTA and CAFTA-DR countries and be managed by “American-owned private employment agencies.” The goal would be to screen nonimmigrant temporary workers who could demonstrate that they had employment in the States and no criminal record.
Despite their name, these new centers would be fundamentally different from the historic Ellis Island. Pence’s plan deals with nonimmigrants, not immigrants; the centers would not be run by the federal government, but by private companies; they would be located in foreign countries, not on American soil; and they would mandate that immigrants prove they had jobs, while Ellis Island strictly enforced contract-labor laws to prevent the importation of immigrant labor to undercut the wages of native workers.
Most likely, Pence wanted to capitalize on the belief that the words “Ellis Island” harkened back to a supposedly happier and more successful time in American history. Pence no doubt hoped that these centers would ease the concerns of Americans and provide a screening process for those entering the country.
Unhappy with the new immigration, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington also looks to Ellis Island. For him, it was a great success, when “control of immigrants coming by ship was fairly easy and a good proportion of those arriving at Ellis Island were denied entry.” Huntington inflates the estimate of those denied entry to 15 percent, well over the average of 2 percent excluded. His naïve belief in both the restrictive nature of Ellis Island and its relative ease in regulating immigrants would have amused those who ran the inspection station and believed they were barely holding back the flood of European immigrants seeking entry. For Huntington and the other commentators, Ellis Island stands as an historical rebuke to what they feel is America’s current unrestrictive immigration policy.
The use—or misuse—of the memory of Ellis Island masks a common thread in past and present immigration debates. Then as now, Americans are asking themselves: How does the United States decide who gets to enter the country and who does not?
There has never been a time when Americans did not ask themselves that question. It is a myth that before the late 1800s America had an open door to all immigrants. Prior to the rise of federal laws regulating immigration, state governments passed laws banning paupers, criminals, and those with diseases. Those laws were not well enforced, and it was not until the era of Ellis Island that the federal government nationalized and regularized immigration inspection.
It is another myth that debate about immigration divides us between noble liberal ideals that support immigration and ignoble, illiberal ideals that seek to restrict it. In reality, this debate highlights fundamental conflicts and contradictions within the American ideal. Our adherence to the virtues of democratic self-rule