On April 17, 1907, 11,747 immigrants passed through Ellis Island in a single day — one person every few seconds, doctors scanning for trachoma with a metal hook, inspectors asking fourteen questions before waving each family through. More than twelve million people had followed Annie Moore, a fifteen-year-old Irish girl given a ten-dollar gold coin as the first arrival in 1892. They came from Italy, Poland, Russia, Hungary, China, Japan — speaking dozens of languages, carrying the customs of dozens of civilizations — because what lay behind the golden door seemed worth almost any sacrifice to reach.
This is the story of how Emma Lazarus, Albert Johnson, David Reed, Ted Kennedy, and César Chávez — reformers, restrictionists, and the immigrants themselves — shaped the most contested question in American history. Across twenty-four chapters, historian Michael Patrick Shanahan traces the full arc from the great wave of the 1880s through the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which abolished the racial quota system and set in motion the demographic transformation still unfolding today.
Inside this immigration history book:
- Ellis Island's processing machine — the six-second medical inspection, chalk letters on coats, and why only 2 percent were turned away despite the station's fearsome reputation (Chapter 1)
- Chinese Exclusion and Angel Island — the 1882 Act and the diplomatic crisis when Congress barred Japanese immigration over the State Department's objections (Chapters 5, 7)
- The Immigration Act of 1924 — Albert Johnson and David Reed's formula cutting Italy's quota from 42,000 to under 4,000, closing the door on the Jewish refugees who would later face the Holocaust (Chapter 11)
- The Palmer Raids and Mexican repatriation — J. Edgar Hoover's 3,000 arrests in one January night; 400,000 to one million people of Mexican descent removed in the 1930s, many American citizens (Chapter 12)
- Hart-Celler Act of 1965 — Ted Kennedy's assurance the law would not change the country's composition; family-reunification chains that proved him wrong; top source countries shifting to Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, El Salvador (Chapter 21)
- The undocumented and DACA — how ending the Bracero Program in 1964 turned circular Mexican migration unauthorized, leaving 800,000 childhood arrivals in legal limbo (Chapter 22)
The question has never been whether to be a nation of immigrants but what kind — how many, from where, on what terms. Those questions were answered badly in 1924, reconsidered in 1965, and are being debated again today with the same urgency. This is the history of how they were first asked.
For readers of Oscar Handlin's THE UPROOTED and Jill Lepore's THESE TRUTHS.