How America treats its immigrants – Nothing new

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

The recent humanitarian crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border has put a spotlight on U.S. immigration in  a way no other story has in recent memory. We’ve been talking about immigration reform for several years, to the point where we’ve talked it to death – literally, the issue is lifeless in congress and President Obama seems to be looking for a way to use his executive power to provide a path forward. There is little optimism for anyone in Washington to act.

This isn’t a new thing.

I’ve brought this up in the past – in conversation and commentary: The immigration issue is as old as the nation. The sides are the same, the arguments haven’t changed, the protests and the anger have not subsided in more than a century. The crisis of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children coming to the border is the most recent flare-up, and it won’t be the last.

Here’s some perspective from the London Times, dated March 14, 1923.  A reporter recounts his impressions of the immigrant flood at Ellis Island, how the immigrants are treated and the conditions they encountered. I found this incredibly interesting. The sad thing is that it keeps happening, and the charge to us is to make sure it stops.

London, TimesMarch 14, 1923*
Ellis Island
How Immigrants Are Treated
A Personal Investigation
(From Our New York Correspondent)
Ten minutes by ferry from New York’s skyscrapers, at the gateway of the “Land of the Free,” and in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, is a “Land of the Unfree”–the immigrant station of Ellis Island.Seen across the lower harbour it has a forbidding look. Grey stone buildings rise four storeys from a ground so flat and rectangular in all its boundaries as to suggest that the land is no land at all, but only a foundation. Not a tree, not a shrub, and no grass, one suspects, under the snow. The buildings are all of one colour and one architecture–practical, severe, without a softening grace. The sole exception is the largest of them all, a sort of reminiscence of the Kremlin; but for all its show of domes and minarets it only accentuates the general sombreness.Here immigrants and sometimes other travellers are taken for examination and passed through the main doorway of the United States or turned back to the far countries whence they came. For most of them it means only a delay of a few hours and then freedom to go where they please. But there are others who, for one reason or another, must stay here for days or even weeks, strangers in a strange land, yielding reluctantly to new customs, in the midst of alien tongues.There have been many allegations of ill-treatment of helpless immigrants and others. The station has been described as “worse than the Black Hole of Calcutta.” In an endeavour to find out how much basis there was for these reports I journeyed to the island. An unexpected visit should, I felt, disclose something at least of whatever was wrong with its management.Mr. Tod, a Scotsman by birth, received me cordially.“Go anywhere you like,” he said; “see anything you want, talk to anybody you please. You’ll need a guide. Mr. Landis (Assistant Commissioner) will go, and I’ll ask the Chief Surgeon, Dr. Hettrick, to show you over the hospital. See everything, and if you haven’t time for it all, come down again as often as you will and whenever you want to.”

The Fight Against Dirt
I took his permission literally and for the next five hours I was engaged in an investigation as thoroughgoing as I knew how to make it. And here are my findings:–

The buildings are inadequate to deal with the burden often put upon them. They were meant to care for an annual influx of three hundred thousand or thereabouts, but in some recent years as many as a million persons have passed through them. But it was to me astonishing to see the patience with which the emigrants’ needs, large and small, were dealt with. None was under a disadvantage because of race or creed or language. Fifty-three languages struggled for intelligibility; there were interpreters for all. Polish, Finnish, Slovak, Italian, Turkish–it made no difference, there was always somebody to understand and explain; sometimes a welfare worker of one of the seventeen societies domiciled in the immigrants’ quarters, sometimes a doctor or a nurse, once–I heard him–a porter easily running the gamut of seven dialects.

The fight against vermin and dirt is, as might be expected, continuous, and it is this very fight that seems to be at the bottom of many of the complaints.

The immigrants are taken to Ellis Island in barges. One barge will carry all the sick, another all the well, but there is no other separation of them–none by classes. Once landed, they congregate in a waiting room, and then are separated, by sexes, only long enough for medical examination, which in the case of women is conducted by women physicians and attendants. Twenty per cent. of the steerage passengers from each vessel are stripped to detect possible vermin. Unless a group exhibits a considerable proportion of vermin-infected persons, the others have to submit only to a few superficial medical tests. Doubtful cases are held in primary detention to await the result of laboratory tests, and the vermin-infected are isolated until they and their clothes can be properly cleansed. Those who have passed the medical inspection successfully–almost invariably a great majority–next reassemble by families in a large hall, where they await their turn for the literacy tests.

Fault Of Immigration Laws
Persons with a clean sheet from the doctors who pass the literacy test–thirty to forty words from the Psalms printed in their own language–and who satisfy the legal qualifications, are at once sent on their way in groups accompanied by guides to the various railway stations. At all times welfare workers, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and others, circulate freely among them, offering advice and assistance. In the basement of the main building are adequate facilities for buying railroad and steamship tickets, changing money, checking and expressing luggage, sending telegrams, and securing food for use on a journey. The food, which I inspected, is sold much cheaper than in New York shops.

Immigrants and others who fail to pass the inspectors are held for examination by one of the boards of special inquiry, of which each consists of three experienced inspectors, aided by interpreters. From the decision of these board appeal may be taken to the Secretary of Labour. The only decisions made on the island that are final are in the case of mental defects and loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases.

The detained who are sick are sent to the hospital. Others are held to await the arrival of relatives or responsible friends, or until documentary evidence can be produced of their right to land or until the ship for their deportation is ready to sail. While they are on the island the steamship companies which brought them to the United States must pay all their necessary expenses, and if they are deported must return them to their own countries, pay back their passage money, and suffer a fine of from $25 to $200.

I took occasion to inquire into several of the complaints of the kind recently reported. Most of them seemed to be based on a failure of the officials to recognize differences in the social status of various immigrants and second-class passengers. Other complaints, arising out of deportations on moral grounds, are often less candidly expressed than they should be. Then there have been protests aroused by the temporary separation of families for necessary delousing–to state it plainly–or because some member of a family was suffering from a contagious disease. These, too, are numerous. Other criticisms of Ellis Island are trivial enough, and, as a rule when analysed , found to be misdirected. They should be directed not against Ellis Island but against the immigration laws.

Nearly every Commissioner has had occasion to find fault with these laws. They are unscientific and unintelligent, especially in their exclusion provisions, and the quota law is undoubtedly the cause of much hardship. Not until they get here can most immigrants from Southern Europe know whether their quotas for the month are filled or not: that is, whether they have a chance to get into the United States or must return to Europe. The steamship companies are gravely at fault in this respect (and in some others), for though they must return “mandatory excludable” persons to their own countries, pay back their passage money, and suffer a fine of $25 to $200 in each case, passage money is now so high with relation to the possible fine that they are all too ready to “take a chance.” It may be asked why the Government does not weed out prospective immigrants before they sail for this country. To that the answer is that it does to a degree, when they seek to have their passports visaed, but is prevented from taking really effective measures by existing law and treaties.

*From: http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/Arrivals/1923a.shtml

Victor Landa is a Founder/Editor of NewsTaco. He ‘s a veteran journalist with more than 30 years of reporting and editorial writing experience in television, print and radio. Follow him@vlanda.

[Photo courtesy of twobucksquiz.blogspot.com]

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