American Passage (53 page)

I’m interested in it as an event, but I don’t feel involved in it.” David Roediger’s
Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs
exemplifies this unease. What makes the journey from Ellis Island to
suburbia so “strange” is not immediately apparent, but it has something to do with the idea that immigrants had to consciously “become white” in order to move into the mainstream of society, and in doing so they bought into ideas of white supremacy, turned their backs on African-Americans, and failed to place themselves in the vanguard of the proletariat for a revolution against capitalism. Apart from the title, Ellis Island barely makes an appearance in the book, but serves as a
convenient symbol for Roediger’s ideological tract.
For historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, the memorialization of Ellis
Island is tied to the troublesome idea of America as a “nation of immigrants.” This idea is problematic because it excludes from our national mythology those black Americans and American Indians not
descended from immigrants. Just as bad for Jacobson, “the immigrant
myth and immigrants’ real-life descendants contributed to the swing
vote that rendered the Republicans the majority party in the electoral
realignment beginning in 1968,” an outcome that he abhors. Jacobson
implies that the arrival of European immigrants was a bad deal for civil
rights. Channeling Malcolm X, he writes: “We didn’t land on Ellis
Island, my brothers and sisters—Ellis Island landed on us.” Another group was also feeling left out of the whole “nation of
immigrants” celebration. To describe the United States in that way,
says political scientist Samuel Huntington, “is to stretch a partial truth
into a misleading falsehood.” Huntington is speaking for white AngloSaxon Protestants, whose ancestors, he argues, were settlers, not immigrants. On a similar note, the author of a history of Plymouth Rock
argues that, as they visit the Ellis Island museum, “the descendants of
Pilgrims do not have to be told that this is a society to which they need
not apply.”
These criticisms suggest another question about the rehabilitation
of Ellis Island. As the federal government originally created the inspection station to exclude undesirable immigrants, is the National Park
Service now practicing another kind of exclusion in its celebration of
the immigrants who came through there?
In the years since, the National Park Service and the Statue of
Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation have made great efforts to be historically inclusive. “It doesn’t matter whether your family arrived on the
Mayflower
or recently got off the airplane from Honduras,” explained
Gary G. Roth, the National Park Service’s project manager for the immigration museum. “Ellis Island is a symbol of four hundred years of
immigration. The story of it all is told here, including that of Native Americans and of forced immigrations, the slaves who were brought
here against their will.”
In 2006, the foundation began fundraising for a project entitled
“The Peopling of America Center.” The new museum will show “the
entire panorama of the American experience,” and look beyond the
traditional tale of immigration, which excludes those brought over in
slave ships and native peoples residing on the continent prior to European colonization. As if to emphasize the inclusive nature of the project, as opposed to the allegedly narrow and exclusionary nature of the
current museum, which focuses almost exclusively on Ellis Island immigrants, the center’s motto is: “It’s About
All
of Us!”

E
LLIS
I
SLAND
’
S ICONIC STATUS
is ever-present. When the online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade launched a new advertising campaign, it chose as its theme the celebration of America’s independent spirit. To embody that spirit, it picked Ellis Island immigrants. “When immigrants came to Ellis Island they carried a dream,” intoned the company’s spokesman, Sam Waterston: “Work hard and opportunity will follow.” The company’s newspaper ad featured Waterston standing next to a large photo of an immigrant family standing on Ellis Island and looking at the Statue of Liberty, as well as a copy of the famous painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In big letters, the ad stated, “Independence is the spirit that drives America’s most successful investors.”

In an episode from the fifth season of
The Apprentice
, those vying for the opportunity to work for Donald Trump were given the task of creating a new souvenir booklet for visitors to Ellis Island. “Yes, even Donald Trump seems to appreciate the historic importance and magical allure of this great national monument to freedom and opportunity,” proclaimed the newsletter of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation.

The island takes a prominent role in movies like
Godfather II
,
Hitch
,
Hester Street
, and
Brother from Another Planet
. The 2006 Italian film
Nuovomondo
, titled
Golden Door
in its American release, deals with Sicilian immigrants who pass through Ellis Island. The film is evocative of the dislocation and confusion of the inspection process; however, it is also historically inaccurate. It shows all immigrants undergoing rigorous physical and mental testing. In reality, the relatively small staff at Ellis Island meant a hasty inspection for most who passed through. Only if immigrants were suspected of having some deficiency did they undergo the full battery of mental and physical testing. William Williams only wished that he could have inspected every immigrant as closely as we see in
Golden Door
.

In the 1990s, New York and New Jersey fought a protracted legal battle for jurisdiction over Ellis Island. In 1998, this battle eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in a 6-3 decision that all but three acres of the site belonged to New Jersey. The Court’s majority relied on an 1834 agreement between the two states that granted the then three-acre island to New York while allowing New Jersey to retain the rights to the surrounding waters and submerged land. Some of that land was eventually added to Ellis Island as it expanded.

Despite the rhetoric from both sides, the fight had little to do with lofty issues and more to do with who would control the development of the rest of the island and the taxes it would generate. Beginning in the 1980s, there had been talk of redeveloping the south side of the island, which used to house medical facilities. The new plan included demolishing some of the abandoned buildings and replacing them with a hotel and conference center, with the money from the commercial sites paying for the restoration of the rest of the buildings. New Jersey wanted to build a footbridge from its side of the Hudson to the island. Lee Iacocca had other ideas, including a nebulous plan for an “ethnic Williamsburg,” an exhibition center devoted to ethnic arts and crafts and food.

In the end, none of the plans was approved and the southern half of the island remained fallow as preservationists staunchly opposed the idea of commercial development. Unfortunately, they had little money with which to restore the decaying southern section of the island. At this point, the National Park Service stepped in and entered into an agreement with a newly formed nonprofit organization called Save Ellis Island, which was now authorized to raise money for the rehabilitation of the island’s southern section.

“Establish the Ellis Island Institute and Conference Center in the thirty unrestored buildings on Ellis Island,” its mission statement declares. “The Ellis Island Institute and Conference Center will capture the power of place to become a world class facility for civic engagement and life long learning on the topics of immigration, diversity, human health and wellbeing, the themes of Ellis Island.”

To help with fundraising and raise awareness of the project, the clothing maker Arrow launched a nationwide public relations effort. It created a high-production-value advertising campaign with television spots and posters featuring actors Elliot Gould and Christian Slater, pro-football Hall of Famer Joe Montana,
American Idol
finalist Kathryn McPhee, and cast members from
The Sopranos.
Everyone was fashionably dressed—no doubt in Arrow clothing—as they walked through the abandoned buildings of the island’s south side to the haunting notes from a string orchestra. To support the effort, the public can buy “Save Ellis Island” T-shirts and leave their family’s immigrant stories on a website.

For those wondering what a clothing maker has to do with immigration, Arrow created the slogan: “Ellis Island. Where the World Came Together and American Style Began.” Posters reinforced the link between Ellis Island, the American Dream, and the themes of family, opportunity, and freedom. Although Christian Slater’s ancestors were decidedly old immigrants from Ireland and England and it is not clear whether they came through Ellis Island, his poster reads: “Ellis Island represents our foundation—a place of possibility and new beginning.” To Kathryn McPhee, Ellis Island is about “the collective heritage of the American Dream.” For Joe Montana, it is about his Italian immigrant ancestors who worked in the mines of Pennsylvania to create opportunity for their family. “Triumph against the odds,” his poster reads. “That’s authentic American style.”

In a different context, the National Park Service’s superintendent of Ellis Island supported the restoration for just the opposite reasons. “It is haunting,” Cynthia Garrett said of the island’s abandoned south side, whose hospital buildings witnessed many tragedies of disease and death. “It tells us that our history isn’t all positive stories and success.”

Whether Ellis Island is a story of uplift and success or harrowing tragedies, it has evolved into something akin to a national shrine. In an editorial on the Supreme Court case, the
New York Times
referred to “Ellis Island’s sacred history.” In 2001, New York City’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, summed up this trend when he said at a naturalization ceremony on the island: “Ellis Island is a wonderful place, it’s a sacred place, and it’s hallowed ground in American history.”

Such talk would no doubt have amused William Williams, Frederic Howe, and so many others who had worked at Ellis Island during its heyday. It would have baffled those immigrants who had to navigate the obstacle course at Ellis Island and probably saw little of the sacred in their experiences.

It was not preordained that Ellis Island should end up as a national shrine. San Francisco’s Angel Island holds none of the same allure for descendants of Chinese immigrants, who received a much harsher reception than European immigrants. The Hotel de la Inmigración in Buenos Aires, known as Argentina’s Ellis Island, pales in comparison to its northern namesake. Though it has also been turned into an immigration museum where modern Argentines can trace their ancestors who arrived a century earlier, it receives few visitors and is nestled off the city’s beaten path.

Having said that, each generation makes its own history and there is nothing wrong with the descendants of Ellis Island reclaiming a historic site that was created, in part, to exclude their ancestors. Too many critics, eager to score political points, ignore the ways that the memorialization of Ellis Island stands as a sharp rebuke to nativists, both past and present.

That said, the historical memory of Ellis Island, like all memory, has been created over time, and that memory will continue to evolve in the future. What exactly this historic site symbolizes can be a matter of debate even with the same family.

After visiting the restored Ellis Island in 2004, a woman sought out her grandmother’s name on the Wall of Honor. This successful New York professional called her grandmother, who had passed through the facility many decades earlier, to share the moment. “What are you doing
there
,” her grandmother testily responded from the other end of the phone line. The grandmother clearly did not share the same positive thoughts that her granddaughter associated with Ellis Island.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Ellis Island’s former life as an immigrant inspection station had given way to its latest incarnation as a national shrine and icon, a modern-day Plymouth Rock. As this transformation occurred, America was in the midst of another wave of mass immigration. What kinds of lessons—if any—could Americans learn from how immigrants were treated a century earlier?

“WE SHOULD NO T LET ANY ONE IN . WHEN WE CAME, the rules were you could not be a burden to the state,” eighty-threeyear-old Sophie Wolf told a reporter on a visit to Ellis Island in 1980. “There were no schools where you could learn the language.” Wolf had arrived in the United States from Germany in 1923, and for her the new immigrants of the 1980s and beyond were inferior to those of her day. Wolf and many others whose ancestors came through Ellis Island believed that late-twentieth-century immigrants were treated with greater leniency and received more help from the government than the generation that arrived at Ellis Island.

At first glance, Wolf seems to validate the recent criticism of Ellis Island for its ethnic triumphalism. Yet when she continued with her thoughts about Mexican, Vietnamese, and Cuban immigrants, her views seemed to shift. “But you’ve got to give people a chance,” she said. “You can’t send them back.” Wolf ’s conflicted response tells us a great deal about American ambivalence toward immigration.

Wolf may have believed that things were tougher for immigrants in the past than they are today, but not everyone agrees. “At the turn of the century [1900],” the National Park Service’s Richard Wells told a reporter in 1998, “America treated its immigrants far better than it does today.” Americans continue to fight over the memory of Ellis Island in the wake of another era of mass immigration.

In one of history’s many ironies, Ellis Island reopened to the public in 1990 just as the United States was witnessing its largest influx of immigrants ever, surpassing the previous record from 1907. The following year would see even greater numbers. During the 1990s, an average of just under 1 million immigrants entered each year, a trend that would continue into the new century.

However much Americans may feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of this new immigration, the total U.S. population was nearly four times larger in 1990 than it was when Ellis Island opened a century earlier. Therefore, immigration in the 1990s was not as large on a percentage basis as that of the Ellis Island years.

Much like the late nineteenth century, the demographics of immigrants in the late twentieth century were also evolving. The great migration of Europeans has largely run its course. In the 1990s, only 14 percent of immigrants came from Europe, while 22 percent came from just one country: Mexico. Another 22 percent came from the Caribbean and Central and South America, while 29 percent arrived from Asia. By 2004, the percentage of Americans who were foreign-born had risen to nearly 12 percent, from its low of 5 percent in 1960, although still below the almost 15 percent during the heyday of Ellis Island.

However, that does not include illegal or undocumented immigrants. In 2005, the government estimated that there were 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. Some have estimated that the number might be as high as 20 million.

This new wave of immigration has produced its own fearful reaction among some native-born Americans. While some discomfort has stemmed from the sheer number of immigrants as well as the fact that so many are nonwhite, much of the current debate centers on illegal immigration. First there was the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which allowed a pathway to citizenship for a few million illegal immigrants and penalized businesses for hiring undocumented workers. Then there was the fight in California in the 1990s over Proposition 187, which would have denied government benefits to illegal immigrants. Most recently, Congress failed to pass immigration reform legislation in 2007, which opponents blocked because they argued it would have given amnesty to illegal immigrants.

In this most recent debate, some conservative opponents of the bill have harkened back to the memory of Ellis Island. Former Republican state legislator and columnist Matt Towery called for an “Ellis Island solution” to America’s immigration problems. He argued for the creation of modern replicas of Ellis Island, where illegal immigrants would “surrender” to authorities. While officials processed their cases and decided whom to admit, these immigrants would be put to work on public projects like building roads and schools. “Why the heck not,” says Towery, ignoring the fact that detained immigrants were rarely put to work while kept at Ellis Island.

“Why was an ‘Ellis Island’ approach good for the goose of American history, but not for the gander of the present day,” Towery asked. Ellis Island immigrants, he continued, had to do more than “put two feet on American soil before earning their status.” Why not demand the same for new immigrants? For Towery, Ellis Island regains its former sievelike quality, which weeded out the desirable from the undesirable, and he wonders why we cannot return to such a process in the twenty-first century.

In a similar vein, Congressman Mike Pence, a Republican from Indiana, crafted his own immigration reform plan that included something called “Ellis Island centers.” Such centers would be located in NAFTA and CAFTA-DR countries and be managed by “American-owned private employment agencies.” The goal would be to screen nonimmigrant temporary workers who could demonstrate that they had employment in the States and no criminal record.

Despite their name, these new centers would be fundamentally different from the historic Ellis Island. Pence’s plan deals with nonimmigrants, not immigrants; the centers would not be run by the federal government, but by private companies; they would be located in foreign countries, not on American soil; and they would mandate that immigrants prove they had jobs, while Ellis Island strictly enforced contract-labor laws to prevent the importation of immigrant labor to undercut the wages of native workers.

Most likely, Pence wanted to capitalize on the belief that the words “Ellis Island” harkened back to a supposedly happier and more successful time in American history. Pence no doubt hoped that these centers would ease the concerns of Americans and provide a screening process for those entering the country.

Unhappy with the new immigration, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington also looks to Ellis Island. For him, it was a great success, when “control of immigrants coming by ship was fairly easy and a good proportion of those arriving at Ellis Island were denied entry.” Huntington inflates the estimate of those denied entry to 15 percent, well over the average of 2 percent excluded. His naïve belief in both the restrictive nature of Ellis Island and its relative ease in regulating immigrants would have amused those who ran the inspection station and believed they were barely holding back the flood of European immigrants seeking entry. For Huntington and the other commentators, Ellis Island stands as an historical rebuke to what they feel is America’s current unrestrictive immigration policy.

The use—or misuse—of the memory of Ellis Island masks a common thread in past and present immigration debates. Then as now, Americans are asking themselves: How does the United States decide who gets to enter the country and who does not?

There has never been a time when Americans did not ask themselves that question. It is a myth that before the late 1800s America had an open door to all immigrants. Prior to the rise of federal laws regulating immigration, state governments passed laws banning paupers, criminals, and those with diseases. Those laws were not well enforced, and it was not until the era of Ellis Island that the federal government nationalized and regularized immigration inspection.

It is another myth that debate about immigration divides us between noble liberal ideals that support immigration and ignoble, illiberal ideals that seek to restrict it. In reality, this debate highlights fundamental conflicts and contradictions within the American ideal. Our adherence to the virtues of democratic self-rule collides with the universalist strains of our national creed in which all men and women are created equal. If everyone is equal, then how can the government sift through immigrants and decide who may or may not enter the country? But if we are a representative democracy, then should our immigration laws not reflect the popular will?

To take the belief in the universalist creed to its logical end means to deny the relevance or justice of borders and boundaries, which are by definition designed to exclude. American sovereignty, under which the nation secures our freedoms, liberties, and democracy, sits uneasily with the notion of the United States as a refuge for the world’s poor and oppressed. Similarly, the United States has increasingly sought to erase invidious forms of discrimination in its laws, but discrimination is at the heart of any immigration policy. How can these beliefs be reconciled?

As Barbara Jordan, the chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, put it in 1995, “immigration to the United States should be understood as a privilege, not a right,” and has been so held for most of our history. But as Jordan’s own life as a female, lesbian, AfricanAmerican politician demonstrates, the late twentieth century witnessed the legal and social explosion of a rights revolution that has expanded liberties to women, minorities, and homosexuals. The logical next step was an expansion of rights not just to immigrants legally residing in the country, but also to those who seek entry into the country and who traditionally have possessed fewer constitutional rights.

Much of the discussion of expanding rights has been rooted in the human rights revolution that followed World War II. Universalist notions of human rights and a greater emphasis on international law strike at the heart of the nation-state. There is a contradiction in one of the bedrock documents of international law—the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It grants all human beings the right to asylum in other countries, the right to flee persecution, and the right to change their nationality if they please. However, the document does not say that nations have the obligation to accept such refugees and grant them entry and citizenship. It is an unenforceable one-way right. The authors of the Universal Declaration created these rights, but in their silence upheld the sovereignty of nation-states.

As Americans, we believe that all individuals are created equal
and
that this is a democracy where the people are allowed a voice in the writing of their country’s laws. We believe in the sovereignty of the United States and the sanctity of borders,
but
we recognize the moral obligation and historical legacy of this country as a sanctuary for those who no longer can abide the conditions in their homeland. That we believe all of these things—often at the same time—comes out most starkly when we talk about immigration. It is this confusion and intellectual schizophrenia that has helped muddle how we think and talk about immigration.

To make matters more complicated, many recent social, economic, political, and ideological trends are helping to weaken the idea of national sovereignty. We live in an era of rapid globalization, which has diluted the idea of national borders. Money, goods, and jobs flow back and forth across borders with little regulation in a world of increasing free trade.

As migrants continually cross borders, ideas of transnationalism are taking root and challenging notions of sovereignty. In an era with relatively easy access to airplanes, telephones, and satellite television, immigrants are able to stay connected with their homelands in ways unimaginable in earlier years. Combine these technological innovations with the ideological ascendancy of multiculturalism over assimilation, and you get the realization of an age of transnationalism whose outlines Randolph Bourne could only have sketched in 1916.

The plenary power doctrine, which has dominated immigration law since the late nineteenth century, is slowly losing its hold. It gives Congress and the executive branch broad authority to regulate immigration with little interference from the courts. The practical result is that would-be immigrants seeking entry to the United States have fewer constitutional guarantees than citizens or nonnaturalized immigrants already in the country. Legal scholars and immigrant activists have been training their collective critical fire against the plenary power doctrine for years. Although never explicitly overturned by the courts, the government has been less and less able to shield the execution of immigration law from court challenges.

In a 2001 Supreme Court case dealing with the rights of a detained immigrant who had been ordered deported, Justice Antonin Scalia repeated words that were familiar for over a hundred years of immigration law. “Insofar as a claimed legal right to release into this country is concerned,” Scalia wrote, “an alien under final order of removal stands on an equal footing with an inadmissible alien at the threshold of entry: He has no such right.” But in 2001, Scalia’s defense of the plenary power doctrine was found in the dissent. He was correct to note that the majority of the Court refused to overturn the precedent of the
Mezei
decision, but instead chose to “obscure it in a legal fog.” In the twenty-first century, it appears that much of U.S. immigration law is mired in that same fog.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 and the war on terror have led to more questions about immigrant admissions and the rights of aliens. Could the United States pass new laws—and more strictly enforce the current ones—against immigrants from the Middle East, a form of ethnic and racial discrimination akin to the Chinese Exclusion Act? On the other side of the equation, the status of suspected terrorists detained by the U.S. military has brought about a legal debate as to the constitutional rights of noncitizens. None of these issues have been settled and the future will likely bring only more confusion and conflict over these laws.

In the early twenty-first century, few Americans are satisfied with the nation’s immigration law. Some Americans find that the law is broken and unenforced, that millions enter the country illegally and little is done. Others complain about the arcane regulations that govern much of immigration law, for instance, treating refugees from one country differently than those from another. They criticize an immigration law that can be so inflexible that it forces millions to enter the country surreptitiously.