Encountering Ellis Island
How European Immigrants Entered America
-
- 15,99 €
-
- 15,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
America is famously known as a nation of immigrants. Millions of Europeans journeyed to the United States in the peak years of 1892–1924, and Ellis Island, New York, is where the great majority landed. Ellis Island opened in 1892 with the goal of placing immigration under the control of the federal government and systematizing the entry process. Encountering Ellis Island introduces readers to the ways in which the principal nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American portal for Europeans worked in practice, with some comparison to Angel Island, the main entry point for Asian immigrants.
What happened along the journey? How did the processing of so many people work? What were the reactions of the newly arrived to the process (and threats) of inspection, delays, hospitalization, detention, and deportation? How did immigration officials attempt to protect the country from diseased or "unfit" newcomers, and how did these definitions take shape and change? What happened to people who failed screening? And how, at the journey's end, did immigrants respond to admission to their new homeland?
Ronald H. Bayor, a senior scholar in immigrant and urban studies, gives voice to both immigrants and Island workers to offer perspectives on the human experience and institutional imperatives associated with the arrival experience. Drawing on firsthand accounts from, and interviews with, immigrants, doctors, inspectors, aid workers, and interpreters, Bayor paints a vivid and sometimes troubling portrait of the immigration process.
In reality, Ellis Island had many liabilities as well as assets. Corruption was rife. Immigrants with medical issues occasionally faced a hostile staff. Some families, on the other hand, reunited in great joy and found relief at their journey's end.
Encountering Ellis Island lays bare the profound and sometimes-victorious story of people chasing the American Dream: leaving everything behind, facing a new language and a new culture, and starting a new American life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fourteen million hopeful immigrants from Europe and Russia coursed through Ellis Island between 1892 through 1924; irrevocably changing American demographics even as the spike resulted in stricter immigration laws. Bayor (Neighbor in Conflict), former president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, fills his quick-moving narrative with dozens of oral and written accounts of those who experienced the "Island of Hope, Island of Tears" in their quest for the American dream. Fleshing out the harsh reality of degrading physical and mental examinations and heart-wrenching familial separations behind the mythologized checkpoint, Bayor describes the infrastructure of the island, using short, revealing first-person staff reports to describe the hospital, school, and sleeping arrangements for those who suffered weeks of detainment. He notes that as crowded and rat-infested as Ellis Island was, the immigration process experienced by Europeans contrasted sharply with that of the openly disparaged Chinese immigrants callously herded through Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Once dilapidated and unsuccessfully listed for sale, the impressive fortress-like building and surrounding area became a National Park attraction, memorializing the inspirational yet unforgiving process of immigration channeled through layers of bureaucracy. Illus.