American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [4]
First, they were concerned that immigrants would become “public charges,” meaning they would not be able to take care of themselves. In the days before a federal welfare system and social safety net, this meant being wards of private charity or local institutions like poorhouses, hospitals, or asylums. If immigrants were to be allowed into the country, they needed to prove they were healthy and self-sufficient.
Second, immigrants were meant to work. Specifically, they were to be the manual labor that fueled the factories and mines of industrial America. Such tough work demanded strong physical specimens. Sickly, weak, or mentally deficient immigrants were deemed unlikely to survive the rigors of the factory.
Lastly, scientific ideas that would reshape the modern world were beginning to seep into the public consciousness in the late nineteenth century and affect the way Americans saw immigrants. Darwin’s theory of evolution and primitive genetic theory offered Americans dark lessons about the dangers of the wrong kinds of immigrant. Many Americans considered poverty, disease, and illiteracy to be hereditary traits that would be passed on to future generations, thereby weakening the nation’s gene pool and lowering the vitality of the average American, not just in the present, but for generations to come.
All of these ideas assume that it is acceptable for a nation to exclude immigrants it deems undesirable. Then, as now, Americans have grappled with the question: Is everyone in the world entitled to enter America? This question lies at the heart of the history of Ellis Island. At the time, most native-born Americans believed that they had the right to decide this as a matter of national sovereignty. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts summarized this view in a 1908 speech:
Every independent nation has, and must have, an absolute right to determine who shall come into the country, and secondly, who shall become a part of its citizenship, and on what terms. . . . The power of the American people to determine who shall come into the country, and on what terms, is absolute, and by the American people, I mean its citizens at any given moment, whether native born or naturalized, whose votes control the Government. . . . No one has a right to come into the United States, or become part of its citizenship, except by permission of the people of the United States.
Even though Lodge was an unabashed believer in the superiority of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, his ideas about national sovereignty strike at the heart of how any nation deals with those who knock at its gates.
The nation’s immigration law was predicated on the idea that a selfgoverning people could decide who may or may not enter the country. But that idea came into conflict with other ideals, such as America’s traditional history of welcoming newcomers. More importantly, it conflicted with the idea that the rights guaranteed in the Constitution were universal rights. How could the Declaration of Independence’s basic creed that all individuals were created equal mesh with the idea that some immigrants were desirable and others undesirable? That conflict between American ideals is central to an understanding of why Ellis Island was created in the first place.
T RADITIONAL HISTORIES OF THE Ellis Island period, like John Higham’s classic Strangers in the Land, focus on the rise and fall of nativism, which the historian defined as the “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign . . . connections.” Yet Higham would soon come to see the shortcomings of his own analysis. Shortly after the publication of his book, he asked: “Shall I confess that nativism now looks less adequate as a vehicle for studying the struggles