Ellis Island arrivals admitted

June is “Immigrant Heritage Month.” Throughout the month we will be posting materials relating to immigration and immigrant cultures of NYC.

One hundred years ago today … responding to the crisis of a dangerously overcrowded facility on Ellis Island, US officials allowed stranded immigrants legal ingress to the country. The crisis had been caused by the Emergency Quota Act (see our June 3rd post) going into effect while shiploads of refugees and immigrants were already in transit. Indeed, some ships had reached the New York Harbor and been forced to anchor and not unload passengers over several days.

From the News:

A joyful babel of tongues from 5,000 of the people of Southern Europe at Ellis Island and in ships in the Bay burst yesterday inte blessings on the mysterious agency for good called *The Congress" when news came that they were to be allowed to enter the Promised Land.

From the throats of mustachioed, swaggering Italian veterans of the world war, in the quavering voices of old Hungarian women and the joyful shrieks of girls came a mighty cheer for the Government that had relented.

Some of them had been penned in ships and on Ellis Island for weeks. Others had been there for so long that the babies at the breasts of mothers were beginning to sicken.

Congress relented after learning that the immigrants had sailed before the passage of the act limiting immigration had been passed. Five thousand of them had been held, literally, "without a country" until yesterday.

…

The steamship companies were as glad as the immigrants. The congressional order held up the ships that brought them over and the companies had to feed them, besides being threatened with taking them back to their old countries.

Commissioner Wallis said that they would be all gone in a few days.

(“Immigrants Cry Blessings When Barrier Rises” Daily News, 13 June 1921, p. 6.)

Ellis Island Commissioner Frederick A. Wallis, on Ellis Island with a group of immigrants in 1920:

– Jonathan Goldman, June 12, 2021

TAGS: immigration, law, refugees, ships