American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [44]
It was this kind of ambivalence that marked the final report of Senator Chandler’s committee. It expressed disappointment not only that so much money had been spent at Ellis Island, but that the “expense certainly justified the expectation that the work of inspection done there should be more thoroughly and effectually conducted than that done at the other ports of entry.” Less than a year into Ellis Island’s career as an immigrant depot, Congress had declared it a disappointing failure.
Though the committee seemed driven by restrictionist concerns, the report did not recommend ending immigration completely or even passing stricter immigration laws. What it did call for was tighter administrative controls that would better sift the incoming immigrants, hopefully raising the exclusion rate higher than 0.2 percent.
Chandler tried to position himself in the ideological middle of the immigration debate. On one side, he placed Henry George, radical author and proponent of the Single Tax, who believed in no “restriction whatever upon the immigration of people from Europe of the Caucasian race, who are not diseased and who are not chronic paupers or criminals.” On the other side, Chandler placed an anonymous citizen from New Jersey who thought immigration “should be stopped entirely and immediately; that it is dangerous to admit more till those that are here are fully Americanized, which it will take years to accomplish.”
In between those extremes, Chandler rejected expanding the categories of excluded classes, but argued for tighter enforcement of current laws. He believed that no member of his committee, including himself, thought that “the time has arrived for the United States to exclude from coming to this country to become citizens, any individuals or families who would make good and valuable members of Society.”
Both extremes of the debate, a political scientist noted in 1892, were “regarded by the majority of thinkers as unsatisfactory; and it is believed that the action called for is neither to bar out all nor to admit all, but rather to take a middle course and restrict immigration by some discriminating measure.” Harper’s Weekly took a similar tack, arguing that although “many of the immigrants who have come to us of late years are not of a desirable kind . . . we believe also that the evils complained of and the dangers apprehended as springing from the influx of such undesirable immigration are very much exaggerated.” Americans would spend the next thirty years trying to find that middle point between complete restriction and a completely open door.
For Chandler, that middle way called for putting more responsibility on steamship companies to exclude unfit immigrants before sailing for America. His committee called for the creation of boards of special inquiry staffed by four inspectors to evaluate all questionable immigrant cases. The last major recommendation was the abolishment of the bonding system for immigrants thought liable to become public charges.
Not surprisingly, the American Hebrew attacked Chandler’s proposal. If Chandler argued that too much power was in the hands of Ellis Island officials, the paper argued that doing away with bonding “would certainly place in the hands of prejudiced commissioners the power to exclude absolutely all immigrants.” The editorial worried that “the Commissioner of Immigration would thus be invested with a degree of absolute and autocratic power, not possessed by any other official and never contemplated by the constitution to be in the possession of any administrative authority without either legal direction or judicial review.” Although the American Hebrew editors exaggerated the extent of Chandler