Ellis Island

Ellis Island has always been, for me, one of the truly iconic American sites. I had wanted to see it myself for decades. Friday I had the opportunity, by the good and generous graces of my friend, Mike Gilliam. Most of us have seen the black and white pictures of ships, decks crowded with people coming from other places, faces full of hope and expectation as they sail past the idealism of the Statue of Liberty to the reality of Ellis Island. These are the people who chose to come, overwhelmingly from Europe, white, young and wanting something different than what they had known wherever home was. This path is the one of interest to me personally, because I am here and who I am due to people who followed this path. I honor and respect the journey, suffering and struggles of those who did not choose to come, those who came through the west coast, those who were not welcomed like the northern and western Europeans. But my family came from Ireland and Scotland, and if not through Ellis Island (we were here before the years Ellis was in operation), then similarly at some other point of arrival.
What was it like on those ships? What did it take to make the decision to leave home, or send the child or children away from home? Did they find community through shared dreams en route, or did they realize at times that they could be in competition for quota slots with their countrymen and women? What was America to them, that they would take the chance on a new life in another part of the world? As I sat in the room where they were taken for sorting and evaluation I couldn't help thinking about those questions. In its peak years, Ellis Island really did look like Francis Ford Coppola's recreation of it in The Godfather Part II, as he showed the young Vito Andolini arriving and being renamed Corleone by a tired, irritable clerk who mistook his hometown for his last name. Given the tens of millions of people who passed through Ellis Island in those years, it's a miracle any of the information was recorded properly.
There is a door at one end of the hall, with a stairway that is divided into three sections. If you were directed to the first section, you were approved and admitted into America. The second section meant that you were found to be ill, and were being taken into isolation for whatever time your malady required. If you were sent down the third part, you were being rejected and sent home to wherever you had come from. I can't imagine the joy of the first group, the terror of the second and the absolute heartbreak of the third.
There was, in many cases, a harshness to Ellis Island. Mistakes were made, from the names that were botched, to the policies that required pregnant women traveling alone to be rejected, lest their babies be born here as American citizens (sound familiar?), to laws that limited the influx of people into the country to the quota of the total population of this or that census that came from a given country. At times, as few as 150,000 were allowed in in a year's time. The immigration debate has been long and often even uglier than it is today. I walked alongside descendents of Chinese immigrants as I took in the exhibits at Ellis Island, including those that detailed the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 19th Century. I wondered how they felt about the promise of America while reading those exhibits.
We have failed on many occasions and in multitudes of ways to live up to our documents and ideals. But Ellis Island bears witness to the importance of the idea of America to the whole world, and the desperate desire on the parts of people who came from anywhere and everywhere to be part of that idea, to possess it and live out its blessings.
It was a powerful experience that I was privileged to have on Friday, and it is one that I would encourage everyone to undertake at some point in their lives, as well.