Remembering Angel Island Immigration Station
Ellis Island is often remembered as an important immigration site in American history but absent from this narrative is Angel Island Immigration Station, originally built in the San Francisco Bay in 1910. As the main entry point for Asian immigrants entering the US in the early twentieth century, the latter facility’s initial purpose was to enforce then-existing anti-Asian immigration laws more strictly.
In accordance with these policies, Angel Island officials limited the entry of these newcomers by subjecting this racial group to further screenings. Upon completing the primary examination, all Asian immigrants, along with those ill or possessing suspicious documents, were required to travel to Angel Island where they were detained for several weeks or months. Shortly after arriving at this facility, health officials conducted medical exams on Asian immigrants to prevent those with certain diseases and medical defects from entering the US. These inspections of these individuals often involved searching their bodies for physical abnormalities and collecting blood and stool samples from them to detect excludable diseases such as hookworm. Furthermore, Chinese immigrants and, if applicable, their associated witnesses faced harsh interrogations from immigration officials who “grilled immigrants on minutiae related to their stated occupations, families, and hometowns.” Chinese immigrants faced deportation and exclusion if their and their witnesses’ answers differed significantly. Due to the aforementioned procedures, Asian immigrants constituted a disproportionate majority of Angel Island detainees and deportees.
Aside from facing the aforementioned procedures at Angel Island, Asian immigrants experienced poor and dull living conditions while staying at this site. Chinese detainees, for example, “were confined to the barracks except for meals and two exercise periods daily.” Compared to their European counterparts and staff members, Asian immigrant detainees often consumed poorer quality meals at this site, and those detained occasionally experienced episodes of anxiety and even terror while endlessly waiting for their release from this station.
Despite such circumstances, these immigrants found various ways to resist their mundane and bleak living situations. Most Chinese male immigrants, for instance, spent time “gambling, reading newspapers, and listening to phonograph records,” and Chinese women took up hobbies such as knitting and sewing. Some Asian detainees carved poetry expressing their frustration at their living conditions into the walls of this site.
In 1940, “a fire destroyed [Angel Island’s] main administration building, and this facility’s immigration station moved to mainland California. Shortly thereafter, this site ceased its immigration operations, and “[processed] and [housed] American troops, German and Japanese prisoners of war, and enemy aliens bound for inland camps” during World War II. In 1963, this site became part of the California State Parks’ system, which planned to demote the immigration facility’s run-down and abandoned buildings.
However, the state parks’ administration did not follow these plans: in 1970, park ranger Alexander Weiss found hundreds of Chinese poems engraved into the facility’s walls. He quickly notified the Asian American community of his discovery, garnering newfound interest in historically preserving this station. Over the next few decades, community activists and descendants of Angel Island detainees worked to recover the carved poems and immigration history of this location, successfully lobby this site for National Historic Landmark Status, allocate necessary funding for restoring this facility, and transform Angel Island into a museum. As a result of such efforts, Angel Island has become “a symbol of America’s history of racial exclusion and… a site of conscience and reconciliation for the nation.”
More recently, other initiatives have raised awareness of this station’s history. The Immigrant Voices Initiative digitally archives the personal stories of Pacific immigrants who passed through this facility. The Immigrant Heritage Wall Project comprises of more than 300 plaques honoring those detained at this station, and a scholarship program allows underprivileged youth to tour this site.