War at the Door

The Circle Line boat that ferries tourists to Ellis Island slows to a crawl as it passes the Statue of Liberty, giving passengers plenty of time to train their video cameras on that beloved beacon of bounty to those old huddled masses. The engine churns, the water sprays, and the looming green lady grows larger and larger. You can't help but provide your own private soundtrack. It hardly matters whether your imagination plays Irish ditties, Mexican danzones, Klezmer doynes, or Korean drums: sentiment gushes in, priming you for the Ellis Island museum, which invites you to envision yourself as a turn-of-the-last-century immigrant who has just disembarked from third-class steerage. And you do.

Though the exhibit doesn't shy away from chronicling the xenophobic currents in American history or the humiliations that greeted those streaming to these shores, it manages to avoid any references to recent debates over immigration or to the myriad snafus of the contemporary system. In an official introduction to the site, for instance, National Park guide K.J. Finley, dreadlocks bouncing from beneath her ranger hat, explains why you might have chosen to make the arduous journey to America in, say, 1905: "You're a peasant and you don't want to die a peasant," she says. "You need a job and you heard there were jobs here." Never once are you called an "economic migrant," which in today's derisive discourse would separate you from a more "legitimate" immigrant, someone fleeing political persecution. These days, new arrivals are slapped into the same categories as welfare recipients -- as genuinely oppressed or merely poor, "deserving" or "taking advantage."

Nonetheless, the inspectors who stood behind the high little desks in the great hall of Ellis Island were the first enforcers of America's abidingly ambivalent immigration policy. The forebears of today's thousands of Border Patrol agents, deportation officers, and other functionaries of the ever expanding Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), those bespectacled, starch-collared men were charged with excluding from entry, first, Chinese people, and, more generally, as 1880s law put it, "any convict, lunatic, idiot or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge."

Since then, the history of U.S. immigration policy can be read as the expansion of the list of those who must be refused: 1891 legislation added polygamists and "persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease"; 1903 law added anarchists. By 1921, baldly racist forces, riding the crest of the Red Scare, won quota restrictions, limiting immigration from any country to 3 percent of its representation in the U.S. according to the 1910 census. Later versions of that act choked off immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe; immigration from Asia had already been barred. And the story of Ellis Island as a gateway to the Promised Land was over.

But the contradictions in American policy -- and the romantic way in which we insist on viewing that policy -- were not. From the day of the first post-Civil War law about whom to let in and how to do it, the agency charged with carrying out immigration policy has had a paradoxical task: to welcome strangers and to shun them. It must, on one hand, defend American jobs against cheap immigrant labor and, on the other, enable business to import low-wage workers; embrace the needy and enterprising and "protect" the nation's founding Anglo-Christian culture and values; succor the refugee and slam the door on the rogue.

This tension tugs at the core of America's founding ideals. Even as the Declaration of Independence listed among the many "Injuries and Usurpations" of the British king his obstruction of immigration to America, Benjamin Franklin panicked about an 18th-century influx of "Palatine Boors," and demanded to know why "Pennsylvania, founded by the English, [should] become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them?"