Toward a Better Life Read online

  During the Great Depression of the 1930s, immigration virtually ended; even the limited quotas often went unfilled. In fact, for the first time in American history, statistics showed more people leaving the United States than entering it. Of course, the gradual improvement in the economy began reversing this trend, especially as war clouds gathered over Asia, Europe, and east Africa just before the outbreak of World War II.

  While nationalism and war fever convinced many loyal German and Italian immigrants to return to their beloved homelands in support of fascism, thousands of people over in Europe, abhorring the change of events there, began fleeing to the United States, Canada, England, Palestine, Latin America, and elsewhere. Hitler's victorious conquests of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece meant the hundreds of thousands of refugees from those places would now have to be labeled as “stateless” aliens. Ellis Island became a way station for those seeking refuge in the United States.

  The war also exacted a severe toll on German, Italian, and Japanese nationals living in the United States. In December 1941, President Roosevelt signed an executive order proclaiming them “alien enemies.” This affected more than nine hundred thousand people. Thousands of them found themselves under FBI surveillance, and at least ten thousand were actually arrested and taken to immigrant stations such as Ellis Island for investigation. In fact, even respectable American citizens were not exempt; in a decision clearly motivated by racism and xenophobia, President Roosevelt stripped US citizens of Japanese descent of their civil rights by signing an executive order that forced them out of their homes and into internment camps throughout the western states.

  With the end of the war, Congress passed the War Brides Act of 1945, which permitted spouses and adopted children of American military personnel to enter the United States without waiting for a quota number. Meanwhile, President Roosevelt had already set up a War Refugee Board and subsequent legislation for helping European refugees and displaced persons enter the United States more easily.

  By 1950, the Cold War was in full swing and Communism had become distinctly unpopular. The Internal Security Act blocked the immigration of subversives, such as communists and fascists. Ellis Island once more came into play as a leading detention facility for arriving foreigners suspected or known to be involved in subversive activities. Perhaps the most notable of these cases were those of Ignatz Mezei, “the man without a country,” who was held for forty-three months, and Ellen Knauff, a war bride who was held for twenty-two months; after long struggles, both eventually won their appeals and were released. By 1954, Ellis Island was determined to be too large and too expensive to operate, and it was closed permanently on November 12, 1954, ending the first great era of US federal immigration control.

  It also marked the beginning of the next great era and America's “new immigrants.” In Toward a Better Life, you will hear the first-person stories of immigrants from both eras and experience what they endured as you take the journey across one hundred twenty years of immigration to America.

  Barry Moreno

  Historian, Ellis Island Immigration Museum, and

  Author of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Ellis Island

  Toward a Better Life is a celebration of all immigrants who have come to America seeking freedom and a better way of life. In it, you will read the firsthand accounts of America's “new immigrants” who have come to America since Ellis Island closed in 1954. They tell their stories in their own words. The book also includes the stories of immigrants from the Ellis Island era to illustrate how America's diverse multicultural landscape has changed over the decades and generations.

  To reflect this transformation, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum is making changes of its own. More than two million people visit Ellis Island annually, and some have said that they did not see a reflection of their own family's experience as immigrants to America.

  That is about to change.

  In 2012, the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation and the National Park Service will unveil the new Peopling of America Center on Ellis Island. This exciting new center, being built at a cost of $20 million, is a significant expansion of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and will tell the complete story of immigration to America and the important role immigrants have played across the generations in the making of this great nation.

  This is significant because there is no other place where this story is told. There are museums of great art, of natural history, and of many other topics, but there is no other museum that tells the total story of the populating of America, as this one will.

  The center will be on Ellis Island to complement the Ellis Island story and because, in the mind's eye of America, Ellis Island stands as the symbol of welcome, freedom, and opportunity—even though there were other ports and other periods of immigration.

  This expansion significantly broadens the scope of the museum's content. It will start with the days of the Native Americans and early Europeans and will continue through the establishment of the nation, the Civil War years, and into the existing exhibits on the Ellis Island era itself (1892–1954). Then we will encounter those people who came to America after Ellis Island closed, millions of people whose arrival has had an enormous impact on our nation and its future. Their stories will now be told, and as a result, Ellis Island will remain a relevant and evolving center for chronicling the ongoing story of the peopling of America. To reflect this expanded mission, upon completion of the center, the museum will be renamed Ellis Island: The National Museum of Immigration.

  We are confident that it will be an enriching educational experience. The people who visit Ellis Island are not just Americans but come from all over the world and are often emotionally moved when they find information about the American side of their family. Ellis Island is a place of discovery—a place to discover the rich story of this nation that was built on the immigrant experience, as well as your own family story and the part it played in the creation of the diverse and unique tapestry that is America.

  In Toward a Better Life you will meet many of the remarkable people who became part of that tapestry. In particular, you will meet America's new immigrants and get a rare look inside their lives—and perhaps a glimpse into our future.

  Stephen A. Briganti

  President and Chief Executive Officer

  The Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.

  We are a nation of immigrants. Each one of us has a story to tell or knows someone who does. What all immigrants share is the desire for freedom and to find a better life. Few subjects remain as controversial and emotionally charged—and central to being American—as immigration, particularly the subject of illegal immigration, and the stories of ordinary people who will go to extraordinary lengths in their quest for freedom and will risk all they have for a taste of what many of us take for granted.

  Today immigration has intensified as one of the nation's hottest and most contentious political issues. There is hardly a day or a week that passes without headlines on websites and newspapers shouting forth the latest development in a seemingly endless stream of immigration-related stories. From the national political controversy over Arizona Senate Bill 1070 to the historic presidency of Barack Obama—the son of an African American immigrant who married an American—this is clearly an issue for our time.

  A recent CNN/Gallup poll found a majority of Americans—69 percent—want to cut back on immigration. As was the case more than a century ago, Americans view immigrants as a threat to their well-being, competitors for jobs and money, and contributors to crime. “The very things they said about the Irish, Italians, eastern Europeans and the Jews coming in,” said one immigration scholar, “are word for word the same accusations being leveled against Hispanic and Asian immigrants coming in today.”

  In one sense then, the business of immigration hasn't changed. It is by its very nature a filtering process geared to reject people r
ather than to accept them—in a phrase, to separate the wheat from the chaff—and thus has always had a negative connotation because of its racist overtones. In this nation of “the haves and the have-nots,” if you're a “have”—if you're an American—then you're part of that elite group that's on the top looking down, but if you're a “have-not,” you're on the bottom looking up. Somewhere in between is the place where the two groups meet. That place, in real terms, is the US border: either the literal border with Canada or Mexico or the metaphorical border of US airports and shipyards.

  More than twelve million immigrants were “processed” on Ellis Island in the sixty-two years between 1892 and 1954. In my previous book, Ellis Island Interviews: In Their Own Words, we met many of those immigrants. We met people like Jacob Lotsky, who escaped the pogroms in Russia, and Holocaust survivor Heidi Reichmann, as well as immigrants who would go on to become famous, like actor Bela Lugosi, writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, and comedian Leslie Townes, later known as Bob Hope. Hope remembered being all of five years old, dressed in a woolen cap and knickers on a cold April morning, standing beside his mother and five brothers as the boat entered New York Harbor and pointing to the Statue of Liberty. He later recalled that his iconic line, “Thanks for the memory,” was born in that moment.

  Ellis Island Interviews attempted to preserve history and record the stories of the last surviving original immigrants who came through Ellis Island from 1892 through 1954 before they and their stories disappeared forever. The book offered the firsthand personal accounts of their lives—oral histories told by the men, women, and children who lived them. These were our ancestors. Our forefathers. The gene pool from which America grew.

  But America has changed dramatically in the years since 1954, when Ellis Island closed its doors. Illegal immigration has become a problem whose solution has eluded federal authorities and escalated into an ongoing national debate in Congress and in state legislatures across the country, especially after the controversial 2009 decision by the state of Arizona to take matters into its own hands to curb illegal immigration because it felt the federal government wasn't doing its job. It is an issue that confronts President Obama not only professionally but also personally; it was recently reported that his half-aunt, fifty-eight-year-old Zeituni Onyango, an illegal alien from Kenya living in Boston and then Cleveland, was finally, after two years of immigration hearings, granted a waiver of deportation in May 2010 and became a legal US resident. It didn't hurt that her nephew happened to be president of the United States.

  Most immigrants are not so lucky.

  In the post–Ellis Island era, we have experienced unprecedented technological advances that have changed the nature and speed of communication, transportation, and how we look at our world, which has gone from agrarian to Internet, from analog to digital, from the village crier to the global village.

  The stories have changed, too. These are not the same nostalgic tales of Grandpa Giuseppe or Aunt Sadie coming to America in search of “streets paved with gold.” During the Ellis Island era, immigrants came predominantly from countries within Europe. In the post-Ellis Island era, there are not just countries but entire continents of people to consider—Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia—and so the stories and experiences are as rich and as varied as the cultural differences among the countries and the continents themselves. While Europe still plays an important role in terms of present-day immigration flows, it now ranks sixth overall, and it is Mexico, not Italy, that tops the list in immigration. In short, there is the rest of the world to consider now.

  In addition, the sheer scale of immigration has changed in the modern era. While more than twelve million legal immigrants came through Ellis Island in the sixty-two years between 1892 and 1954, more than thirty-seven million legal immigrants came to America in the fifty-six years between 1954 and 2010. Factor in illegal immigration, conservatively estimated at more than twelve million, and you can see how the numbers in the modern era have dramatically increased—more than quadrupled—since immigrants to America started coming from all over the world, not just predominantly from Europe.

  What keeps people coming to America's borders and shores?

  During the Ellis Island era, the drivers of freedom were numerous: political, social, legal, medical, educational, economic, religious, and more. Today, in this modern era of tolerance, economic freedom is by far the principal motivation of immigrants to America in all modes of transportation, not just by boat, but by plane, car, truck, foot, helicopter, even Jet Ski®. Many people have the mistaken impression that America's new immigrants are principally uneducated Latinos. Not so. America's new immigrants include the well educated and the affluent, as well as the middle-class who come from good families and are here to study at our universities or earn higher-paying jobs, such as brilliant young Indian computer programmers or the burgeoning ranks of technology whiz kids from Asia.

  Others, at the lower end of the economic spectrum, are frequently migrant workers seeking a better wage and a better life. Many are illegal, crawling under high-watt border fences, or digging tunnels in the middle of the night, selling drugs for cash, and then giving cash for freedom. Other, less fortunate souls come by boat from China or South America hiding in cargo holds—women, mostly, but also children, many of whom are lured by the promise of good jobs and instead will end up working off a $40,000 ticket to freedom as prostitutes, part of an elaborate global network in the human flesh trade. And though many immigrants, from all walks of life, have come here to work hard and send money back for family members to join them as their Ellis Island ancestors did, most illegal ones will be caught and deported. Some will try again. Others will give up. A great many immigrants, however, have successfully assimilated into society, improving their lives with each new generation and thus strengthening the materials that make up the great mosaic that is America.

  But what really changed immigration to America in the modern era and eliminated the need for Ellis Island altogether was the transfer of responsibility for alien processing, which was gradually assigned to US consulates or embassies abroad at the beginning of the 1930s. In this way, all immigrant processing was completed before a visa was granted to enter the United States. These hundreds of consulates in countries all over the world became like mini–Ellis Islands.

  America's new immigrants are different in many ways from their Ellis Island ancestors. They, too, seek a better life, but many of them today are more educated and offer more in the way of professional knowledge in science and technology, fields that have also made coming to America easier for all immigrants. During the Ellis Island era, the overall commitment to immigrate was a huge deal. Leaving your homeland entailed the likelihood that you would never come back and never see your relatives again, a complete cutoff—this on top of a boat trip that could last over a month. There's a great quote from former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in her autobiography, My Life (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1976), in which she writes as a Russian Jewish immigrant coming to America in 1906, “I can remember only the hustle and bustle of those last weeks in Pinsk, the farewells from the family, the embraces and the tears. Going to America then was almost like going to the moon.”

  Today an immigrant can board a plane and be in the United States in less than twenty-four hours from virtually anywhere, and usually the trip is much shorter than that. So the level of commitment in immigrating to America is far less today. In addition, the expectations upon arrival are minus the fear of the unknown felt by Grandpa Giuseppe and Aunt Sadie. Today's new immigrants can click on the Internet and see exactly where they're going. They also have the solace of knowing that they can readily travel back and forth, which was not really an option before the mid-twentieth century. As a result, many of today's new immigrants plan to go back to their homeland; the emotional commitment is further reduced because cell phones allow people to stay in touch in a way that didn't exist before, and international calls, once prohibitively expensive, have
become relatively cheap.

  The world has changed. The game has changed. Immigration has changed. It is no longer just an American phenomenon, but a global issue that touches scores of nations, each with at least one underclass: the French have the Algerians; the Germans have the Turks; the Turks have the Kurds; the Italians have the Chinese and Latin Americans (many of whom find work as domestics); the Spanish have the Moroccans, Romanians, and Ecuadoreans (in that order); and so it goes. The Canadians? They have American liberals. Overpopulation and overdevelopment on a global scale have forced people to scatter to all corners of the globe in a desperate search for the diminishing returns of economic opportunity. Historically, much of the United States's immigration—and its “golden promise”—was part of the quest to conquer the frontier: the great westward march and migration to settle the land; build cities and towns, homesteads and railroads out of prairie dust; and mine the mountains for gold and silver in the inexorable push to reach the orange groves of California and the sweet salt air of the Pacific, first encountered by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery in 1805. This later inspired newspaper editor Horace Greeley, who supported liberal policies toward settlers, to famously exhort in a July 13, 1865, editorial in the New York Tribune: “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”