American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [7]
Instead of seeing the work of Ellis Island in terms of immigration restriction, it is better to see it as a form of regulation. The relatively unobtrusive federal government of the nineteenth century evolved into a system of greater regulation by the twentieth century, one that did not end capitalism, but sought to control its excesses. Over that same period, the laissez-faire attitude of the federal government gave way to a system that did not end immigration, but regulated it in the public interest.
The impulse behind immigration control was the same impulse that banned child labor, regulated railroads and monopolies, opened settlement houses, created national parks, battled the corruption of urban political machines, and advocated for temperance. It was these reforms of the Progressive Era that drove the expansion of the federal government to ensure that it would regulate private business in the public interest.
In this sense, immigration control fits well as a Progressive reform. To many reformers, big business, together with selfish steamship companies and aided by corrupt political bosses, sought to keep the faucet of immigration open full blast as a source of cheap labor to power the new industrial economy and provide voters for urban political machines. Reformers wanted to temper this by regulating immigration, not ending it. They believed that a large industrial and urban society needed to be actively molded and shaped, and that the older laissezfaire philosophy of the nineteenth century was inadequate to deal with the problems of the modern era.
Much of the political history of twentieth-century America was a battle over the extent of government regulation. Historians generally agree that the spirit of Progressive reform temporarily died out after World War I, and it is no surprise that this period also sees the end of the kind of immigration regulation practiced at Ellis Island for three decades. This regulatory approach to immigration would be replaced by the blunt instrument of immigration quotas by the 1920s. This new mechanism would not try to sift desirable from undesirable immigrants, but instead severely limit immigrants based on where they came from. America did not completely shut down immigration from Europe, as it had done earlier to immigration from China, but the era of mass immigration was effectively ended. Ellis Island had lost its raison d’être.
When a new spirit of reform came with the New Deal and the federal government again began to intervene actively in the private sector, immigration was left out of the equation. The nation’s conflicting views toward government power would find itself mirrored in its immigration laws.
Ellis Island would become little more than a prison for enemy aliens during World War II and for noncitizen aliens with radical beliefs during the Cold War. In the flush of postwar prosperity, the government abandoned Ellis Island in 1954 and left it to rot. Not until the 1980s, when the nation began to witness the rise of a new era of mass migration, did the country again pay attention to Ellis Island. By then, the former inspection station had evolved into an emotional symbol to millions of Americans, a new Plymouth Rock. Parts of the old facility were rehabilitated and reopened as a museum of immigration history. Ellis Island had now entered the realm of historical memory.
THIS BOOK IS A biography, not of a person, but of a place, of one small island in New York Harbor that crystallized the nation’s complex and contradictory ideas about how to welcome people to the New World. It traces the history of Ellis Island from its days of hosting pirate hangings in the nineteenth century to its heyday as America’s main immigration station where some 12 million immigrants were inspected from 1892 to