Historic Periods
After colonization, immigrants to the U.S. entered the country through multiple ports and land borders. Although never the exclusive entry point to the U.S., Ellis Island processed millions of immigrants during the first decades of the twentieth century–largely originating in Europe. Their experiences have been the primary way we remember Ellis Island. Yet this is often not the way people themselves remember their experiences. A voyage from a home village in Poland, for example, to a new home in New York may have taken months, with the few hours spent on Ellis Island merely a blip in a kaleidoscope of memories and experiences.
There were other people from other parts of the world, or from other backgrounds, whose relationship to Ellis Island was more complicated: people from parts of the world deemed less desirable, or people who confronted policies or ideologies that made their immigration more difficult, if not impossible. This website presents some of that complexity and documents periods in U.S. history when U.S. ideologies allowed some admittance into the United States, while others were denied.
Precolonial Ellis Island
What is known today as Ellis Island was originally a territory utilized by Native Americans for oyster harvesting and fishing. Different groups of Native Americans may have used the Island, including the Lenape.
For at least 13000 years, New York and Manhattan have been populated by a number of Native American tribes. Ellis Island was occupied by Lenape peoples before Dutch and English settlers took that land from them and forced the Lenape into the Ohio River Valley and the Midwest. At the time of colonization in the 17th century, Lenape were engaged in wide-ranging food production, including the cultivation of gardens, hunting and fishing. Ellis Island seems to have been an important site for harvesting oysters and other shellfish, and a shell midden excavated in the 1980s confirm the island’s productivity. The same archaeological excavations also revealed human remains, which were reburied and memorialized in a series of ceremonies culminating in 2003.
The incursion of European colonists caused a decline in Lenape population from disease and from genocide. Ultimately, the Dutch enclosed manaháhtaan (Manhattan) in fortifications and forced Lenape peoples off of the island, leading to their diaspora from their ancestral lands (Lenapehoking) to distant reservations. Ellis Island then passed between multiple owners, including Samuel Ellis, until it became property of the federal government in 1808.
Yet there are still many Native Americans in the New York area, and the Lenape Center in Manhattan is a source of exhibits and educational programs articulating Lenape perspectives. The Center’s efforts have led to a number of important events, including the addition of a turtle-shell dome over the former Tammany Hall at Union Square. The turtle is central to Lenape cosmology, and the land is said to come from a turtle surfacing from the water. In addition, the Center helps to coordinate between members of the Lenape diaspora across the United States and Canada.
Resources
Lenape Center. https://lenape.center/
Museum of Indian Culture. https://www.museumofindianculture.org/
References
Baker, Joe, Hadrien Coumans and Joel Whitney, eds. (2022). Lenapehoking: an Anthology. NY: Lenape Center: Brooklyn Public Library.
Cantwell , A.M. and D. Wall (2003). Unearthing Gotham: the Archaeology of New York City: An Eleven Thousand Year Chronicle. New Haven: Yale University Press.
1790 - 1892: Immigration Before Ellis Island
Before the opening of Ellis Island in 1892, immigration into the United States was primarily governed by individual states, reflecting a decentralized approach to immigration policy. Each state had its own regulations and procedures for admitting immigrants, shaped by the specific demographics and economic interests of the region. Settler colonialism heavily influenced these policies, with states often favoring immigrants who were perceived as contributing to the expansion of white settlement and the development of the frontier. The first immigration law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, established that “white” immigrants could apply for American citizenship after living within the country’s expanding borders for two years and were of good moral standing. This law was not only the first federal immigration policy, but also equated “good immigrants” as “white.”
New York had the largest port of entry in the 19th century and it designed restrictive immigration policies that excluded newcomers who had criminal records, contagious diseases, or were perceived to become “wards of the state.” To pay for potential “public charges,” New York imposed a head tax on shipping companies. Shippers did not want to pay additional fees so they sued the state in 1841. This case along with another in Massachusetts became part of a larger body of cases called the Passenger Cases, which denied states ability to create head taxes. By 1875, the federal government took over immigration policy and slowly moved into the realm of processing. Simultaneously, New York purchased Fort Clinton in 1855 and transformed it into the first immigration processing center in the state, Castle Garden. Between 1855 and 1890, 8 million immigrants passed through the “Emigrant Landing Depot.”
U. S. Laws, S. (1790) A bill to establish an uniform rule of naturalization, and to enable aliens to hold lands under certain restrictions. New-York, Printed by Thomas Greenleaf. New York. [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2020769535/.
1892-1924: Federal Regulation of Immigration
After colonization, Ellis Island passed through several hands, including New York state and finally the federal government, which used it for several fortifications. Beginning in 1875, the federal government began to take a more active role in the regulation of immigration and began passing laws to exclude people deemed undesirable. In 1882, for example, the first of several “Chinese exclusion acts” was passed during a period of intensive, anti-Asian xenophobia. All of these laws meant a more centralized and bureaucratized approach to U.S. immigration, and construction began at Ellis Island. Opening in 1892, construction continued until 1897, when a fire consumed most of the new construction. After an architectural contest, new plans were drawn up, and new facilities were opened in 1900, with additional construction and island expansion extending over the next decades. This was the most active period for Ellis Island, and from 1892 until the passage of restrictive quotas in 1924, 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island.
What was immigration like for them? It was not, as it is today, a lengthy process involving multiple filings, interviews and lawyers. For most of the people arriving at Ellis Island, the process took a few hours and required nothing more than matching one’s name against a ship’s manifest, undergoing a cursory medical examination, and answering a few questions. Passports and visas were not widely used until World War I. This was the case for approximately 80 percent of people entering through Ellis Island. But other people found their experience there more problematic. Among them, people who were excluded from immigration and people who were found by officials to be undesirable and then deported. These included people lawmakers had excluded as a class as well as people assigned the ambiguous category “LPC”: likely to become a public charge. People singled out for medical problems could also be deported, although many were treated on Ellis Island itself.
(Immigration Hall - 1910): Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
(Immigration Hall - 1906): Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
[Detention pen at the Ellis Island Immigration Station, New York] ; Library of Congress.1902 Library Catalog ; MMS ID 9915470323406676; NLM Unique ID 101547032
1924-1954: From Immigration to Deportation
After World War I, rising nativism and xenophobia led to calls to curtail immigration–particularly non-Western and non-Northern European immigration. Quotas were set based on the 1890 census in order to minimize immigration from non-Northern European peoples. People in the Western hemisphere were not part of this quota, however, and continued to immigrate into the United States.
At the same time that the National Origins Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants, the procedures for immigration to the U.S. had also changed. Instead of judging the fitness of would-be immigrants upon their embarkation, people were more and more required to apply for visas through the U.S. consulate in their country of origin. No longer a place to process immigration, Ellis Island became more and more a place for internment pending deportation.
During World War II and its aftermath, Ellis Island housed a number of people deemed undesirable by the U.S. government, including U.S. residents suspected as being Nazis and, after the war, people accused of being communists.
(1952) Part of a group of 171 aliens illegally in the country wave goodby to the Statue of Liberty from the Coast Guard cutter that took them from Ellis Island to the Home Lines ship Argentina in Hoboken for deportation / World Telegram & Sun photo by Al Ravenna. United States, 1952. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2008678836/.
Post-1954: Into the Ruins
By the early 1950s, Ellis Island was little used and had fallen into serious disrepair. The hospitals were closed in 1951, and there were few people being detained there. In 1954, the island was shut down altogether. For a while, the fate of the island was unclear, until President Lyndon B. Johnson added it to the national park system in 1965.
Plans for stabilization and rehabilitation were solicited, and some noted architects proposed various ideas. Eventually, the National Park Service adopted a plan for the island that would address its deteriorating structures. In the meantime, different groups proposed alternative uses for the island, including an intentional community for Black Americans.
After all of these alternative plans fizzled, the National Park Service began to improve the park for visitation, with the main building opening as the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in 1990. Today, Ellis Island welcomes over 3 million visitors per year.