As an unprecedented surge of immigrants came to the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt cleverly summed up the immigration policy goals of Americans for every era: “We cannot have too much immigration of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the wrong kind.” Determining just who was of the “right kind” and the “wrong kind” would preoccupy Americans for the next two decades as, indeed, it preoccupies the country today. American Passage by Vincent Cannato and Angel Island by Erika Lee and Judy Yung trace how this was done at America's principal immigrant entry point on the Atlantic (New York) and on the Pacific (San Francisco).

For much of America's modern history, the principal determination of “right kind” vs. “wrong kind” was made at New York's Ellis Island and its Castle Garden predecessor. The initial determinations of who could enter were made by immigration inspectors following national policy as interpreted by the Commissioner of Immigration at New York and, often, by their own individual preferences. It has entered into our national folklore that “bigoted officials made [immigrants'] lives miserable and changed the family's name from something with six syllables and no vowels to Smith” (p. 15). Cannato sets out to disabuse readers of these and other notions.

American Passage gives readers a history of how the politics of immigration played out at Ellis Island. This is an important story, and Cannato tells it well. In narrative style that pulls the reader from one wave of immigrants to the next, we see both the politics of personal advancement of immigration officials at the island and in Washington, and their interplay with ideological and policy-driven arguments. Cannato is also particularly insightful on how Ellis Island has been variously appropriated as a symbol—of the “plucky immigrant” surmounting formidable obstacles, of unity as a “nation of immigrants” and, of course, as the iconic focus of the fundraising drive that rescued the station from dilapidated oblivion.

However, there is only partial truth in the advertising that this is “The History of Ellis Island.” In 420 pages of narrative, readers will learn little about the architecture of Ellis Island and nothing new about the mechanics and logistics of the processing of the millions of arriving immigrants.Footnote ¹ There are few data on who the immigrants were, where they came from, or how long various nationalities or classes of people were detained. The economics of the immense transit point that was Ellis Island are virtually ignored.

Cannato rather forces the narrative into chapters on how people with various undesirable qualities were treated, leaving the impression of succeeding waves of arrivals “likely to become a public charge,” of dubious morals, and with mental and physical defects. In particular, the screening and inspecting of immigrants is seen as a sort of theater to satisfy Prescott Hall and his effete, elite brethren at the Immigration Restriction League, whose anti-immigrant ire searched for a succession of reasons for excluding “Crime, disease, and wretchedness/Of a hundred lands/All the world's incompetence/Dumped upon our hands” (Wallace Irwin, quoted on p. 154). Fortunately, the courts and, importantly, the various ethnic- and religious-based immigrant aid societies acted as a serious counterweight to the caprices of the government and its officers. Despite endless debates over whom to exclude and how, “less than 2 percent of individuals… .were excluded at Ellis Island” (p. 11).

Cannato does not refers to any other immigrant ports of entry, leaving the unfortunate impression that immigration policy was interpreted only at Ellis Island, and that the only important issues in immigration policy were those that might affect the New York station. And it leads to egregiously misleading statements: “Immigrants faced tougher scrutiny at Ellis Island than they would at any other major inspection station in the country, with the exception of those along the Mexican and Canadian borders” (p. 221).

This, of course, was manifestly untrue. The life and times of Angel Island, the major immigration station on the Pacific Coast and located in San Francisco Bay, stand in harsh contrast to Ellis Island. In Angel Island, Lee and Yung examine the immigrant experience at what was clearly not the “Ellis Island of the West.”

Lee has argued elsewhere that Angel Island represents the beginning of America's transformation into a “gatekeeping nation.” This was the bitter fruit of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the first immigration legislation aimed at a specific ethnic or racial group. It made Chinese ineligible for naturalization and severely limited the number and nature of Chinese able to enter the United States. It was also the direct ancestor of the National Origins Act (1924) that established immigration quotas—at Ellis Island as well as other ports.

The main questions at Angel Island concerned the bona fides of arriving Asians: under the Exclusion Act, arrivals had to establish their membership in classes (merchants, students, ministers, teachers—and their dependents) exempt from being excluded. This was true for the Chinese for the sixty-year life of the act, and for Japanese, South Asians, Filipinos, and other Asians as they came within the restrictionists' sights. Most immigration inspectors believed that many Chinese were lying about who they were and their “exempt” status—and, as Lee wrote in her dissertation, these suspicions were probably correct. Arrivals would be kept in detention while witnesses and documentation were rounded up and, if necessary, appeals filed. In contrast to Ellis Island, a significant minority of cases were detained for long periods—in one case, nearly twenty months.Footnote ²

The contrasts between the two island immigration stations begin with extreme differences in scale—a mere 300,000 are estimated to have passed through Angel Island (p. 17), perhaps 17 million through Ellis Island. Only 7 percent of all Chinese applicants at Angel Island ended up being excluded (p. 93), but that was still three or four times the rate at New York. We have good reason to think that the Chinese exclusion laws deterred many thousands of Asians from coming to the United States, but little evidence that Europeans were discouraged until the imposition of strict quotas in 1924.

While Angel Island is often presented as a Chinese story—and, indeed, it is central to the history of Chinese Americans—less than half of those detained there were Chinese. The net of exclusion caught large numbers of Japanese (the group most likely to get sent to Angel Island), South Asians, Russians, Filipinos, and other. Lee and Yung devote a chapter to each of the major ethnic groups that passed through Angel Island, using transcripts of interrogations, interviews, and memoirs. The major strength of Angel Island is how the authors weave together the many firsthand accounts by immigrants and would-be immigrants, illuminating the particular historical and legal conditions that posed hurdles for them. For instance, the experience of South Asians, as colonial subjects of Britain, demonstrates the effect of not having a strong advocate in the form of a national union or powerful consulate: where Japanese had both and Chinese the latter (and a “union” of sorts in the Chinese Six Companies), they were able to mitigate some of the harshest aspects of the various policies excluding Asians.

Angel Island covers nearly all aspects of the Immigration Station and its history. It does leave the larger story of the politics of immigration—the type of story that Cannato tells—to be told elsewhere. At times, the desire for inclusiveness can seem like a stretch, as in the devotion of an entire chapter to the four hundred Mexicans who entered via the San Francisco island station. Together with American Passage, Angel Island helps us see how the immigration debates of a century ago are still with us, and how rooted in our political fabric is the ongoing national discussion about who is the “right kind” of immigrant, and who is not.