American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [42]
The intervention of the United Hebrew Charities helped sway Weber’s decision. The charity signed guarantees or bonds for those immigrants thought to be paupers, promising that they would not become public charges. Weber admitted he had no idea whether the guarantees could be legally enforced. For Chandler, this was another example of sentiment trumping the “correct practice under the law.”
In this, Chandler was surely correct. There was no feature for the bonding of suspect immigrants under immigration law. This brought up the issue of possible reverse discrimination. Why, one congressman wanted to know, were only Jewish immigrants allowed in with guarantees or bonds? Weber, sensitized and even traumatized by his trip to the Jewish Pale of Settlement during the previous summer, answered that the plight of Jews was different. “The assisted immigrant, however, who comes from Russia comes here assisted because of extraordinary circumstances that have reduced him practically to a state of destitution,” Weber explained.
Chandler’s committee concluded it was impossible to tell how many of the assisted Jewish immigrants on the Massilia had come down with typhus. However, the committee believed “that if its views of the present law had been enforced typhus fever would not have been introduced into the city of New York.”
It is ironic that Jewish charitable agencies came in for such criticism for their role in bonding Jewish immigrants. The spread of typhus would certainly have been much worse without them. Agents of the United Hebrew Charities immediately alerted Edson’s office about the typhus outbreak, and most immigrants were kept together in boardinghouses run by the charity, making it easier to contain the disease. In fact, Edson praised both the Baron de Hirsch Fund and the United Hebrew Charities for their assistance.
But this did little to ease the concerns of Chandler and his allies. They found more fuel for their crusade when the behavior of Weber’s assistant, James O’Beirne, became public. Whenever Weber was away from Ellis Island, O’Beirne assumed the duties of acting commissioner. In one instance, O’Beirne came up with a requirement that all immigrants have $10 in their possession or they would be excluded as paupers. Using this formulation, he detained about three hundred immigrants, but Weber set them free upon his return.
Chandler believed this highlighted the arbitrary nature of the exclusion process. “What we want to get at is how much better or worse the immigrant fares when he is in Col. O’Beirne’s hands than when he is in yours,” Chandler told Weber. For Chandler, this incident, coupled with the Massilia incident and the activities of the Jewish charities, proved that whether or not an immigrant would be excluded “depends upon no statutory provisions, and is decided very much according to the personal feeling or judgment of the person who makes the decision.”
Throughout much of his testimony, Weber was on the defensive. Had he chosen to be more combative, he could have countered that Congress provided no way to determine who was likely to become a public charge. It fell to immigration officials to decide such questions. The modern bureaucratic government had been created almost from scratch. Congress made the laws creating this administrative state, but it was up to the political appointees and bureaucrats of the separate departments to work out detailed instructions and interpretations of the law to operate their agencies. Congress could write new laws or express displeasure through public hearings, but the day-to-day operation of federal agencies was out of its hands.
Given the fact that immigration officials had such wide latitude, Chandler and his allies homed in on one issue they thought showed the inconstancies of immigration policy