The immigration stations of Ellis Island and Angel Island are sites with great historical significance. Until this day, these places keep stories of millions of immigrants that passed through the doors of the stations between 1880 and 1930. In this period, Ellis Island was the largest and the busiest immigration station for people coming to the USA, mostly from Europe. It was interesting for me to learn that many women were detained by the Ellis Island officials, as before World War II, women were not allowed to enter the country without men. It was also interesting to learn that since 1907 children under 16 were not allowed to enter the country without a parent. Those who arrived at Ellis Island alone were sent back to their home countries. People who did not pass medical inspection were also sent back home from the station.
It seems astonishing to me that the station officials managed to inspect so many immigrants daily. The photos and video footages that have been preserved in the archives of the station show that the number of people passing through was incredibly high. Another fact that seemed interesting to me is that the station officials could separate children from their parents if they did not believe that they were, in fact, related. For example, when Lucy Attarian recalls the day she and her family were passing the inspection at Ellis Island, the official did not believe that she was related to her parents. 1 Her hair and general appearance were different from theirs, and the official told them to leave without Lucy. However, when she started crying after them, he believed that she was their daughter. The officials were cautious because there were many orphans coming to the country with other people’s families.
Although the Angel Island Immigration Station was often referred to as the “Ellis Island” of the West, the conditions in these sites were very different, and so was the treatment of the arriving immigrants. This was due to the fact that people passing through the Angel Island station were mainly from China, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had introduced strict regulations for immigrants of Asian origin. Many of them had to face “detention, quarantine, interrogation, and even deportation”. 2 Detention barracks for men and women were overcrowded and unsanitary, which often caused diseases to spread.
The walls of the barracks are full of cravings, which are mostly Chinese poems. People expressed their fears, dreams, and hopes for the future in those poems, and this seems to me an extraordinary example of how art can raise a person’s hopes even in the darkest of times. For most people in the barracks, those were the darkest times: they lived in uncertainty and fear of deportation, separated from their families, not knowing when they were going to see their loved ones again. The Angel Island officials could only allow individuals with certain occupations and those with relatives in America to enter the country. To ensure that an immigrant was, in fact, related to some established Chinese nationals in the country, they had to be subjected to detailed interrogations. The things that the officials asked about were often unreasonably and excessively detailed and too specific even for family members to know about each other. The documents in which these family histories were stored and structured were called “Coaching Papers”. 3 This is where the term “Paper Sons and Daughters” comes from it was a name for those who managed to pass the extremely challenging interrogations, although their relation to the already established immigrants was fictitious.