The US has a legal immigration system; you do not have to sneak across the border illegally to enter the US. Being a permanent resident is a “privilege” and not a “right.” (US Citizenship and Immigration Services – uscis-gov)
Permanent immigrant residents are expected to respect and be loyal to the United States and to obey our country’s laws. Being a permanent resident also means that there are new rights and responsibilities. (US Citizenship and Immigration Services – uscis-gov)
In the 1800s, rising political instability, economic distress, and religious persecution plagued Europe, fueling the largest mass human migration in the history of the world.
Prior to 1890, individual states, rather than the Federal Government, regulated immigration into the United States. Castle Garden (now Castle Clinton), located in the Battery of Manhattan, served as the New York State immigration station from 1855 to 1890.
Around 1890, it became apparent that Castle Garden was ill-equipped and unprepared to handle the mass influx, leading the Federal government to construct a new immigration station on Ellis Island. During construction, the Barge Office in the Battery was used for immigrant processing.
The new structure on Ellis Island began receiving arriving immigrants on January 1, 1892. Annie Moore, a teenage girl from Ireland, accompanied by her two younger brothers, made history as the very first immigrant to be processed at Ellis Island.
If an immigrant’s papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process lasted 3 to 5 hours. The inspections took place in the Registry Room (Great Hall) where doctors would briefly scan every individual for obvious physical ailments.
Doctors at Ellis Island soon became very adept at conducting these “six second physicals.” By 1916, it was said that a doctor could identify numerous medical conditions (ranging from anemia to trachoma) by simply glancing at a person.
Most immigrants entered the United States through New York Harbor, although there were other ports of entry in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, and New Orleans. (Ellis Island Foundation)
Between 1892 and 1954, over twelve million people entered the United States through the immigration inspection station at Ellis Island, a small island located in the upper bay off the New Jersey coast.
There is a myth that persists in the field of genealogy, or more accurately, in family lore, that family names were changed there.
The legend goes that officials at Ellis Island, unfamiliar with the many languages and nationalities of the people arriving at Ellis Island, would change the names of those immigrants that sounded foreign, or unusual.
No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or “written down wrong” at Ellis Island or any American port. That idea is an urban legend. (American Library Association)
“Nearly all … name change stories are false. Names were not changed at Ellis Island. The proof is found when one considers that inspectors never wrote down the names of incoming immigrants.”
“The only list of names came from the manifests of steamships, filled out by ship officials in Europe. In the era before visas, there was no official record of entering immigrants except those manifests.”
“When immigrants reached the end of the line in the Great Hall, they stood before an immigration clerk with the huge manifest opened in front of him. The clerk then proceeded, usually through interpreters, to ask questions based on those found in the manifests. Their goal was to make sure that the answers matched.” (Vincent J Cannato, NY Public Library)
Inspectors did not create records of immigration; rather they checked the names of the people moving through Ellis Island against those recorded in the ship’s passenger list, or manifest.
The ship’s manifest was created by employees of the steamship companies that brought the immigrants to the US, before the voyage took place, when the passenger bought their ticket. The manifest was presented to the officials at Ellis Island when the ship arrived. If anything, Ellis Island officials were known to correct mistakes in passenger lists. (NY Public Library)
Many names did get changed as immigrants settled into their new American lives, but those changes were made several years after arrival and were done by choice of someone in the family. (American Library Association)
Surnames, then, become one measure of immigration to the US, though you sometimes have to look beneath the surface for what they’re saying. For example, many German immigrants changed Schmidt to Smith or Müller to Miller upon arrival on American soil – or in response to anti-German sentiment surrounding World War I. (Ancestry)
As mass migration began growing, immigration laws started changing. Contract laborers were allowed admittance in 1864, but barred in 1885, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
In 1875, prostitutes and convicts were barred entry, and in 1882, those convicted of political offenses, lunatics, idiots, and persons likely to become public charges were prohibited. Polygamists and political radicals were added to the no-go list in 1903. (Smithsonian)
In the Islands, by the middle of the 19th century the Hawaiian population had declined drastically through the impacts of disease and epidemics and the dispersal of the young men of the Kingdom on whaling ships and seeking their fortunes in the California gold fields.
Starting in the 1850s, when the Hawaiian Legislature passed “An Act for the Governance of Masters and Servants,” a section of which provided the legal basis for contract-labor system, labor shortages were eased by bringing in contract workers from Asia, Europe and North America.
There were three big waves of workforce immigration: Chinese 1852; Japanese 1885 and Filipinos 1905; several smaller, but substantial, migrations also occurred: Portuguese 1877; Norwegians 1880; Germans 1881; Puerto Ricans 1900; Koreans 1902 and Spanish 1907.
“Hawai‘i is America in a microcosm – a melting pot of many racial and national origins, from which has been produced a common nationality, a common patriotism, a common faith in freedom and in the institutions of America.” (Senator Herbert
Lehman; GPO)
For nearly one hundred years immigrants arriving in Hawaiʻi had their initial processing in the area of the present immigration building at the entrance to Honolulu Harbor.
In the 19th century they came over the channel wharf to be processed at the pavilion and quarters of the Kingdom’s Quarantine and Immigration Depot built in 1879 on what was popularly called Fisherman’s Point.
King Kalākaua, who personally initiated Japanese immigration in a visit to the Emperor, visited the station to greet the initial group of Japanese laborers arriving in 1886. After a hospitable welcome which included entertainment of hula dancers, he invited some of the group to the Palace to display their skill at fencing. (NPS)
The United States government took over immigration matters after annexation and built new structures out over the mud flats (which opened July 4, 1905.)