Did the United States have open borders in the Ellis Island years? Many people, including some critical of my recent Washington Examiner column on Donald Trump’s revised immigration proposals, seem to think so. But the fact is that from the days of the early republic, government sought to require that immigrants had the capacity to support themselves and were free of communicable disease.
The story is ably told in Vincent Cannato’s book American Passage: The History of Ellis Island. For much of the nineteenth century, state governments rather than the federal government fulfilled this function, with New York and Massachusetts leading the way with inspection stations in the ports of New York City (the famous Castle Garden) and Boston. In 1890 the federal government took over the function and, famously, opened the Ellis Island inspection station in New York harbor in 1892.
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The Ellis Island station processed 80 percent of the immigrants who arrived between 1892 and 1924, some 12 million people in all, and barred only about 2 percent of those who arrived from entering the country, those with what were considered serious diseases and those “likely to become public charges.”
The opening of Ellis Island coincided almost exactly with a major change in the source of immigrants, as I explained in my book Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics. Up through the 1880s, most immigrants to the United States came from northwestern Europe—the British Isles, Germany and, starting in the 1880s, Scandinavia. Starting in the 1890s, in low numbers at first due to an economic depression that began in 1893, most immigrants came from eastern and southern Europe.
These new immigrants were typically those of disfavored ethnicity — Poles and Jews from the Russian Empire, Czechs and Slovaks and Slovenes and Croats and Serbs and Rumanians and Jews from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and southern Italians from the northern Italian dominated Kingdom of Italy. Relatively few ethnic Russians, Austrians, Hungarians or northern Italians immigrated during these years, while immigrants from Spain and Portugal headed mostly to Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking Latin America.
In Shaping Our Nation, I argue that one attraction America had for these immigrants is that it seemed to stand for civic equality; they saw themselves as going from second-class citizenship in their home countries to equal citizenship in the United States.
At least half of earlier immigrants had been Protestants; the bulk of these new immigrants were Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Jewish. Many Americans feared that they would never assimilate, and such fears resulted in a near cutoff of eastern and southern European immigration in the immigration act of 1924, which established country quotas based on the ethnic balance of the United States in the 1890 Census.
Immigration restrictionists argue that this “pause” in immigration facilitated assimilation of Ellis Islanders and their children into American life. I argue that the effects were much less significant than that. Immigration would have tailed off sharply after the Depression began in 1929 (even some of the smaller country quotas were not filled in the 1930s) and would have fallen toward zero after the outbreak of World War II. The war was in any case a powerful force for assimilation, as some 16 million men were inducted into the armed forces, and military personnel and defense workers moved around within the nation.
The Ellis Island immigration was a response in part to demand in U.S. labor markets for relatively low-skill workers in giant factories and in burgeoning businesses like Manhattan’s garment industry. These were jobs that millions of Americans wouldn’t do—millions of American Southerners, that is. For during the 75 years between the Civil War and World War II, years when some 30 million Europeans migrated to the United States, only about 1 million white Southerners and 1 million black Southerners migrated from the economically lagging South to the fast-growing North, where wages were typically twice as high.
It was as if there was a wall running somewhere around the Potomac and Ohio Rivers, barring Southerners from moving north. Economic historian Gavin Wright tells this story in his book Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War. This is another example of how the motivations for migration are not just economic but cultural: the cultural gulf and enmity resulting from the Civil War (and the reasonable belief by Southern blacks that they wouldn’t be treated very much better in the North than the South) was as strong a bar to migration as the feeling of second-class ethnics in eastern and southern Europe’s multiethnic empires that they would be treated as equal citizens in the American North was a strong incentive for it.
How is this relevant to today’s immigration situation? The American economy in the Ellis Island years was producing a large and growing demand for low-skill labor to which Southerners did not respond, and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe did. The American economy in this century does not seem to be producing a large demand for additional low-skill labor, as it arguably did during much of the 1980s and 1990s.
During the Ellis Island years, the government did impose standards which immigrants had to meet, but they were very modest and excluded only a few who sought to come. But they also excluded an unknown larger number who didn’t make the effort to emigrate for fear of being turned back and perhaps an even larger number who would like to have emigrated but could not manage to raise enough money for transatlantic steerage fare and the cash that Ellis Island inspectors required immigrants to possess.
The policy that Donald Trump embraced in his tenth of ten points in his immigration speech would impose greater restrictions on proposed legal immigrants, in the interest of holding down low-skill immigration and giving priority to high-skill immigration. That seems to be in line with the character of today’s American labor market and its likely needs for the future.
