American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [5]
The “nativist theme, as defined and developed to date, is imaginatively exhausted,” Higham concluded. By overemphasizing the psychological interpretations of American attitudes toward immigrants, he diminished the rationality of individuals and reduced their reactions to complex social changes down to primitive and primordial emotional reflexes. That does not mean downplaying the often ugly anti-immigrant sentiment that has characterized certain periods of American history. Higham is mostly correct that such feelings were rising in the late nineteenth century as the demographics of immigration shifted from northern Europeans to southern and eastern Europeans. He is also correct that World War I brought a significant opposition to foreigners.
However, both of these periods also saw a larger shift in American society. The former occurred during the dawning of the era of Progressive reforms, with the beginnings of the federal administrative state designed to enact those reforms. The latter occurred at a time of great disillusionment with reform and government in the wake of the Great War. As the Progressive impulse to regulate society ebbed, Americans instead tried to restore a lost world that had been overtaken by the rise of modern, industrial America.
By looking past the mere expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment and focusing on the implementation of immigration policy, we find that much of the debate surrounding Ellis Island was not as polarized as we might imagine. Despite the heated rhetoric, this debate took place within the proverbial forty-yard lines of American political life. There was considerable consensus about immigration. Most Americans found themselves in the political middle on the issue. That debate took place most famously at Ellis Island for more than three decades.
Few Americans argued for a completely open door to all immigrants and few argued for their complete exclusion. Allan McLaughlin, a doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service, put forth the parameters of the debate:
There are extremists who advocate the impossible—the complete exclusion of all immigrants or the complete exclusion of certain races. There are other extremists who pose as humanitarians and philanthropists and who advocate an act of lunacy—removing all restrictions and admitting all the unfortunate—the lame, the halt, the blind and the morally and physically diseased—without let or hindrance. Neither of these extreme positions is tenable. The debarring of all immigrants, or the unjust discrimination against any particular race, is illogical, bigoted and un-American. On the other hand, the indiscriminate admission of a horde of diseased, defective and destitute immigrants would be a crime against the body politic which could not be justified by false pretense of humanity or a mistaken spirit of philanthropy.
Americans rarely challenged the government’s right to exclude or deport immigrants, but rather fought over the legitimate criteria for exclusion and how strictly government should enforce those laws at immigration stations like Ellis Island.
Take the opinions of two men active in the debate during this time. Max Kohler was a lawyer for the American Jewish Committee who doggedly defended the rights of Jewish immigrants and criticized the strict enforcement of the law at Ellis Island. Nevertheless, he admitted that the immigration law at the time was appropriate in barring those deemed undesirable. “We do not want aliens to be admitted of any race or creed,” Kohler said, “suffering from loathsome or contagious diseases, mentally or morally defective, contract laborers or paupers or persona likely to become public charges in fact.” What he opposed was both the stricter enforcement of the law and the passage