Closing The Golden Door

The immigration station at New York's Ellis Island opened in 1892 and remained the largest U.S. port for immigrant entry until World War I. In popular memory, Ellis Island is typically seen as a gateway for Europeans seeking to join the "great American melting pot." But as this fresh examination of Ellis Island's history reveals, it was also a major site of immigrant detention and exclusion, especially for Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian travelers and maritime laborers who reached New York City from Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, and even within the United States. And from 1924 to 1954, the station functioned as a detention camp and deportation center for a range of people deemed undesirable. Anna Pegler-Gordon draws on immigrants' oral histories and memoirs, government archives, newspapers, and other sources to reorient the history of migration and exclusion in the United States. In chronicling the circumstances of those who passed through or were detained at Ellis Island, she shows that Asian exclusion was both larger in scope and more limited in force than has been previously recognized.

The immigration station at New York's Ellis Island opened in 1892 and remained the largest U.S. port for immigrant entry until World War I. In popular memory, Ellis Island is typically seen as a gateway for Europeans seeking to join the "great American melting pot." But as this fresh examination of Ellis Island's history reveals, it was also a major site of immigrant detention and exclusion, especially for Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian travelers and maritime laborers who reached New York City from Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, and even within the United States. And from 1924 to 1954, the station functioned as a detention camp and deportation center for a range of people deemed undesirable. Anna Pegler-Gordon draws on immigrants' oral histories and memoirs, government archives, newspapers, and other sources to reorient the history of migration and exclusion in the United States. In chronicling the circumstances of those who passed through or were detained at Ellis Island, she shows that Asian exclusion was both larger in scope and more limited in force than has been previously recognized.

This work updates an established American textbook on immigration and ethnic history, demonstrating the post-war shift from European to Third World immigrants. Extensive revisions include a discussion of undocumented immigration and the Simpson-Rodino Bill. All the important events of the last five years, especially the 1990 Immigration Act, are presented. The author examines the changes in refugee status and highlights the new wave of East European and Soviet immigrants to the USA.

Whether immigration helps or hurts the United States economically, socially, and culturally is a complex question that has both troubled and defined North America since the first colonists arrived. At various stages in American history, the country has both welcomed immigrants as the backbone upon which the nation was founded and rejected them because of their religious, cultural, or linguistic background or because of their economic status. This book outlines the legal and social history of immigration to the United States and frames the immigration debate today. Through full-color photographs and insightful sidebars, readers will gain a nuanced understanding of the many factors that continue to define immigration policy.

Relatives of three immigrants from Eastern Europe await their arrival in New York in 1893. When passengers from their ship are ferried from Ellis Island to the Battery, the three immigrants are nowhere to be found. Ship line officials inform the relatives that the three had died at sea and their bodies dropped overboard, but how they died was not known. Flashbacks describe the lives of the three persons up to the time of their deaths, revealing their character and behaviors that might influence what led to their deaths. The grieving relatives are determined to find out how they died in order to have closure and peace of mind. Sara Newman, the sister of one the deceased, locates the ship's captain and gets his explanation of what happened to her brother and the others. She then finds the ship's purser, who tells her a different story about what took place. Later, she speaks to a neighbor's sister, who had been on the ship, and gets a third account of how the three immigrants died. Being unable to achieve closure, Sara's family hires an immigration lawyer to investigate and determine what the real explanation was for how the deaths happened. The lawyer's research leads to a court hearing that uncovers the facts, but not before some intriguing developments.

A unique resource for the general public and students interested in immigration and public health, this book presents a comprehensive history of public health and draws 10 key lessons for current immigration and health policymakers. The period of 1820 to 1920 was one of mass migration to the United States from other nations of origin. This century-long period served to develop modern medicine with the acceptance of the germ theory of disease and the lessons learned from how immigration officials and doctors of the United States Marine Hospital Service (USMHS) confronted six major pandemic diseases: bubonic plague, cholera, influenza, smallpox, trachoma, and yellow fever. This book provides a narrative history that relates how immigration doctors of the USMHS developed devices and procedures that greatly influenced the development of public health. It illuminates the distinct links between immigration policy and public health policy and distinguishes ten key lessons learned nearly 100 years ago that are still relevant to coping with current public health policy issues. By re-examining the experiences of doctors at three U.S. immigration/quarantine stations—Angel Island, Ellis Island, and New Orleans—in the early 19th century through the early 20th century, Doctors at the Borders: Immigration and the Rise of Public Health analyzes the successes and failures of these medical practitioners' pioneering efforts to battle pandemic diseases and identifies how the hard-won knowledge from that relatively primitive period still informs how public health policy should be written today. Readers will understand how the USMHS doctors helped shape the very development of U.S. public health and modern scientific medicine, and see the need for international cooperation in the face of today's global threats of pandemic diseases.

The discovery of mysterious gateway leads to a new world full of dangerous possibilities in this science fiction tale from an iconic author. When a repairman accidentally finds a parallel universe, everyone sees it as an opportunity, whether as a way to ease Earth’s overcrowding, set up a personal kingdom, or hide an inconvenient mistress. But when a civilization is found already living there, the people on this side of the crack are sent scrambling to discover their motives. Will these parallel humans come in peace, or are they just as corrupt and ill-intentioned as the people of this world? “Dick’s best books always describe a future that is both entirely recognizable and utterly unimaginable.”—The New York Times Book Review

More than 17 million immigrants came here-to the front door of America-from 1890 to 1915 in what has been called the largest mass migration in human history. In the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island is one of the nation's most important historical sites and is one of our most heavily visited national monuments. Its story is the story of our people and their struggles for freedom and dreams of a better life.