The spirit of Ellis Island

look at my leftist public intellectuals dawg

There’s a story Americans love to tell about how when their great-great-great grandnonno or grandbubbe arrived in this strange, beautiful country, they lost a part of themselves at Ellis Island after some immigration bureaucrat forced them to Anglicize their names. The thing about these stories, touching as they are, is that they aren’t true. In 1819—more than eight decades before the immigration station at Ellis Island opened—Congress began requiring all passenger ships to provide a manifest naming every single person on board. There were no names changed at Ellis Island, no forcible process of Americanization upon inspection.

These stories, while apocryphal, reveal a lot about Americans’ self-perception regarding their own origins. Our ancestors shed the old world and became citizens of the new, for better or worse, adding a little flavor to the great American melting pot, but not so much as to overwhelm those who came before. There’s a term for this: assimilation, which the writer Freddie deBoer described as “a big word, and a fraught one” in a recent diatribe on how liberals, in their endless foolishness, have refused to accept assimilation as a necessary condition to immigration. According to deBoer, this we-are-the-world naïveté is both condescending to immigrants and politically damaging to their supporters. I’m not going to argue with deBoer on the merits of his argument, which for the record I think is incurious, poorly reasoned and overly credulous to the nativist right. My main issue is with the point he makes here:

The spirit of Ellis Island gets invoked a lot in these debates, but it’s worth looking at it as a particular story: mass legal immigration by immigrants who were eager to learn the language and to embrace certain values of a new country. The point, ultimately, is that whether we liked it or not, a degree of assimilation has always been part of successful mass migration efforts.

I won’t fault deBoer for having a schoolchild’s understanding of Ellis Island. This is a persistent American myth that, like the story of immigrant ancestors changing their surnames under duress, seems to have been internalized to some degree or another by a large swath of the population. But deBoer is a professional writer, a person who clearly believes his thoughts and ideas not only have merit but are a serious intervention in misguided public discourse. If he’s going to hold up Ellis Island as a model of the halcyon days of mass legal migration, it would behoove him to know its actual history.

Ellis Island opened as an immigration inspection in 1892, under the authority of a law passed the previous year. That legislation, the Immigration Act of 1891, was one of the first laws aimed at limiting European migration. The 1891 law created new classes of inadmissible aliens, including polygamists, people infected with certain contagious diseases, and people likely to become a public charge. Inspectors at ports of entry like Ellis Island were allowed to conduct medical examinations of prospective immigrants—who weren’t considered legally present in the United States until and unless they passed these inspections—and order those deemed unfit to return to their countries of origin. On the opposite coast, all Chinese immigrants were turned away under the auspices of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, though some exceptions were made for students, diplomats, merchants, and other travelers.

immigrants departing a steamship at Ellis Island, 1902

The criteria for inadmissibility were expanded in 1903 (to include epileptics, beggars, anarchists, and “importers of prostitutes”) and again in 1907.¹ In 1917, after several failed attempts, Congress required all prospective immigrants to pass a literacy test in their native language; the idea was to exclude the lower classes, the kind of people nativists claimed were taking jobs from hardworking Americans of good Nordic stock and tainting the gene pool in the process.

Even those immigrants who managed to jump through these hoops were held in low regard. To be clear, despite these myriad restrictions, white European migration to the United States was still effectively unlimited. There was no ceiling on how many immigrants could come to the United States. At the time, the country had only ever had open borders for anyone who wanted to call America home—with one notable exception, of course, in the form of Chinese immigrants. At the onset of the Gilded Age, mass migration was a boon for immigrants and Americans alike. “The very real economic exploits of the age underwrote its booster spirit,” John Higham writes in Strangers in the Land. “There seemed no end to what the country could produce with men enough to do the work and buy the results. The immigrants served both ways. And business leaders, marveling that population growth kept pace with economic opportunities, saw in the flow of immigration the workings of one of the grand laws of nature.”

Despite criticisms that immigrants undercut American wages, the newcomers were often just as radical as their US-born counterparts, if not more so. There’s a reason the earliest laws attempting to curtail European migration targeted anarchists and communists. Higham identifies three nativist traditions in the United States: anti-radical, anti-Catholic, and—most crucially for our purposes—racially motivated nativism. After the economic crisis of the 1870s, sparked by speculation and an irrational belief in endless growth, Anglo-Saxonism emerged as the driving force behind immigration restriction at the turn of the twentieth century. The old-stock families whose fortunes were derived from colonial development and westward expansion chafed at both the arrivistes whose familial wealth was newer and gaudier, and at the immigrant workers whose labor made such wealth possible. Coastal elites were in crisis. Their institutions were being infiltrated by outsiders just as their cities were being overrun by Old World immigrants. They feared being overtaken and out-bred by people from the so-called “lower races.” These concerns soon spread nationwide, disseminated by newspapers, scientific journals, publishing houses, and popular magazines owned and operated by the aforementioned coastal elites.

The ideas espoused in books like The Passing of the Great Race—Madison Grant’s 1916 eugenicist tract detailing Nordic Europeans’ superiority over their Alpine and Mediterranean brethren—and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy were so commonplace that contemporary readers of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby surely picked up on the reference:

This nativist sentiment, bolstered by a healthy dose of eugenicist thinking, culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924, which implemented per-country quotas based on the national origins of the US population as of the 1890 census. The purpose of these quotas wasn’t to ensure that the newcomers would assimilate; it was a response to concerns that they could not assimilate, and that all Americans were worse off as a result. “We have admitted the dregs of Europe until America has been orientalized, Europeanized, Africanized, and mongrelized² to that insidious degree that our genius, stability, and greatness, and promise of advancement and achievement, are actually menaced,” Representative John Tillman of Arkansas said during the debate over the law. “This country can no longer be the melting pot for foreign nations,” Tennessee Rep. Samuel McReynolds of Tennessee declared. “There was a time when that could be done, when conditions were different, but this time has long since passed.”

All this despite significant efforts to encourage assimilation among European immigrants. As Robert L. Fleelgler writes in Ellis Island Nation, the years surrounding the Great War saw a surge in “Americanization programs” designed to absorb newcomers into the great American melting pot. Henry Ford, for example, “created an English school where his foreign-born workers learned their new language as well as other American traditions,” a program the Department of Interior urged other employers copy. The Army and American Legion taught immigrant English, American history, and civics through a program called Americans for All. “‘In this school,’ program materials noted, ‘racial distinctions disappear almost over night—they are all Americans… Every day, all day, the men live and work in an American atmosphere.’” Nativists remained unswayed, believing that immigrants were both unwilling and unable to assimilate due to their inferior genes.

It wasn’t until the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act that “contributionism," Fleegler’s term for the belief that immigrants enhanced America with their ideas and skills, began to take off. After 1924, “ethnic communities received fewer new arrivals to sustain their Old World ways and language, and the second generation began to acculturate faster,” Fleegler writes. “Many of the ‘foreign’ customs that had drawn the ire of the proponents of restriction became less evident, contributing, perhaps, to a moderation in nativist sentiment.”

If deBoer were honest—or perhaps if he knew what he was talking about—he’d admit that no amount of assimilation is enough to win over nativists, unless of course it’s coupled with a massive decrease in immigration, legal or otherwise. English classes and Americanization programs couldn’t convince turn-of-the-century nativists that their new Italian, Jewish, and Slavic neighbors should be welcome in America. The goal was restriction, not assimilation.

a June 1924 article in the New York Times

DeBoer provides one real-world example of the perils of taking in unassimilated immigrants: the backlash to Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, whose presence in the community “provoked a ton of racist and xenophobic commentary” after rumors began swirling that they were eating cats and migratory birds. DeBoer doesn’t get specific about the tenor of this “racist and xenophobic commentary”—or the fact that it was amplified by JD Vance, Donald Trump, and the entire right-wing media ecosystem—focusing instead on the

legitimate gripes from residents, most importantly the driving down of pay in the low-wage job market. And yet I think we can also recognize that scenario as a failure for the Haitians as well. Can it really be considered humane to airdrop 15,000 Haitian migrants into an alien culture with minimal assistance in finding housing, learning English, getting jobs, and otherwise integrating into the local community? I very much believe that it can not. Too many on the left who support more legal immigration, as I do, refuse to engage with mass immigration as a challenging effort in social engineering, rather than simply as a benevolent opening of doors.

There’s a lot to unpack here, much of it untrue. To start, the Haitian immigrants in Springfield were almost certainly not “driving down pay,” because they weren’t working under the table. Many of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield were recipients of Temporary Protected Status—a type of liminal immigration status granted to people whose countries of origins have been destabilized by conflict or natural disasters—meaning they have work permits and pay taxes just like everyone else. It’s possible that some Haitian migrants in Springfield arrived in the US via Biden’s immigration parole program, in which case they had not only work permits but also US citizen sponsors who agreed to be financially responsible for them in the event that they couldn’t provide for themselves. And some had green cards or were US citizens! In any case, the backlash to the presence of Haitians in Springfield was not because they were “driving down” pay, and it’s dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Moreover, no one was “airdropped” into Springfield. People went there of their own volition, often because they heard the community had good jobs and affordable housing. It’s not unlike how my family moved from Colombia to a specific Florida suburb because my dad’s friend from high school lived there and helped us get settled. This is how immigrant communities spring up. It’s not new, and it’s not inherently sinister, though it can be. In 2019, I covered the ICE raids at chicken plants in Mississippi, where I was somewhat surprised to find a thriving community of Guatemalan immigrants who had ended up in the rural south. Many of them were indigenous and spoke Spanish as a second language. They ended up in Mississippi because of the whims of global capital. They were certainly being taken advantage of. Poultry processing is backbreaking work; after the raids, one of the chicken plants held a job fair and still couldn’t find enough American workers, largely because the chicken plants refused to raise their wages.

My point here is not that we need immigrants to do the backbreaking labor Americans won’t do, or that they should do said labor for less pay. Of course we should advocate for fair, dignified wages for everyone regardless of citizenship or immigration status. (For the record, one of the Mississippi plants had been fined for labor violations that had been reported by immigrant workers themselves.) Of course we should have systems in place to ensure that people can learn English, get jobs, and find housing. But it’s completely unserious to suggest that these are nativists’ motivations. People like JD Vance and Stephen Miller don’t give a shit about assimilation. It’s all lip service. They don’t think it’s possible, and they obviously don’t want to fund the programs that would make it possible. They have repeatedly implied and at times explicitly said that their goal is not only to crack down on illegal immigration but to overturn the Immigration Act of 1965—which inadvertently created the conditions for a rise in Asian and African immigration to the US—and return to the kind of system we had in 1924—one in which migration was racially determined. This ideology has permeated the American right. The zoomer who just resigned from DOGE over his racist tweets³ had posted about his support for a “eugenic immigration policy.” Who are we kidding!

In a subsequent piece on immigration, deBoer chastises undocumented workers for accepting these conditions. “It makes me angry that so many undocumented immigrants work for less than the minimum wage; it’s a terrible failure of solidarity,” he writes.

This dynamic isn’t the fault of the undocumented people, really, it’s the fault of the system. Again, my preference would be to let immigrants in legally and then insist that they obey our minimum wage laws and other labor regulations, like everyone else.

From this snippet alone, you’d be forgiven for thinking that deBoer puts forth a vision for a more expansive legal immigration system. Indeed, he opens the piece by calling himself “an internationalist, which is to say that I don’t respect the concept of country.” You see, he’s “an open borders guy” who believes the “nation-state is a fiction, and a very recent one, invented for the benefit of capital and imperialism.” But, he continues, we live in the real world, and in the real world, us open-borders abolish-the-nation-state guys have to suck it up and accept that Americans want to seal the border. We have to meet people where they are. We have to, deBoer claims, “Take Some Kind of an L on Immigration, For Now.”

This piece is more intellectually dishonest than the Ellis Island one, and deBoer’s grasp of recent events is somehow worse than his understanding of history. He starts with a reasonable enough premise: that “this recent wave of immigration … was the product of no policy or shitty policy.” That’s not entirely untrue. The recent wave of migration is the product of global social and economic destabilization exacerbated by the pandemic; our response to said migration was the product of shitty policy, namely the fact that until very recently, Congress hadn’t passed an immigration law in decades. As a result, immigration policy has largely been the domain of the executive branch since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of 9/11.

I’ve criticized Biden’s immigration policies repeatedly, and I’ll do so again briefly. In my mind, the major issue with Biden’s administration was that there were two warring factions within the White House: an old guard that was hypersensitive to any accusations of having “opened” the border, and a younger, more idealistic set of staffers who attempted to put forth a vision of a more inclusive legal immigration system. As I’ve written elsewhere, here’s how that played out:

Biden did try to carve out a more humane immigration policy than his predecessor, at least at the beginning of his term. He implemented a 100-day deportation moratorium, ended Trump’s disastrous “Remain in Mexico” policy, and urged Congress to pass a bill creating a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. Conservatives predictably sued over the moratorium and refused to consider an “amnesty” bill. The Biden administration took the legal challenges, combined with the right’s immediate accusations that Biden was presiding over a “border crisis,” as a sign to negotiate with Republicans on immigration instead of fighting them. Biden spent the remainder of his term in a defensive posture, fending off accusations of having “opened” the border while simultaneously alienating the immigrant rights groups that helped elect him by embracing the Title 42 expulsion order implemented by Trump at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

To hear deBoer tell it, Biden “really did preside over a massive influx of immigrants without valid legal status, in part through asylum claims that no one sincerely believes fit our asylum law.” Far be it from me to defend the man, but Biden didn’t cause a global migration crisis, nor did he establish our asylum system, which requires the government to give everyone who expresses fear of returning to their home country a chance to argue their case in immigration court. Biden, in fact, didn’t even let most of these people in. He kept Trump’s Title 42 expulsion order in place until 2023, and once it expired, he imposed new restrictions to asylum that had first been implemented—and declared illegal—under Trump. DeBoer, of course, does not mention this. Given his description of a conversation between Chris Hayes and immigration reporter Jonathan Blitzer, I’m unconvinced he’s familiar with how any of this works and uninterested in actually understanding it.

Here’s an episode of Chris Hayes’s podcast (transcript) where he interviews Jonathan Blitzer, who has a new book out on immigration. (Which I have not yet read, though I will.) … It’s a conversation about the moral justifications for migration and the wickedness of the policy that prevents it that somehow ignores the realpolitik behind our immigration debate.

For what it’s worth, deBoer also ignores the realpolitik behind our immigration debate, putting forth hypotheticals like “what if every single Guatemalan claimed asylum here? Would the good liberals support that?” instead of asking more relevant questions like “do Americans support immigration reform? What types of policies appeal to the median voter?” He mentions polling in passing, and doesn’t discuss specifics (it “reflects complex feelings … among the American people … but there’s no question that the public has clearly signaled a desire for a far more restrictionist immigration policy than what we’ve recently been used to”).

The year Biden was inaugurated, a plurality of Americans believed immigration should either increase (33%) or stay the same (35%). Polls suggested that even Trump voters supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. By the time Biden left office, 55% of Americans wanted to see immigration decrease—though most voters, including those in swing states, still preferred the establishment of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants over mass deportations.

So what happened? Americans were certainly put off by the influx of immigrants at the southern border—not to mention their increased presence in cities across the country, thanks in part to Greg Abbott’s ingenious bussing scheme, and right-wing media’s immediate claims that Biden had thrown open the gates of Trump’s border wall to the world’s poor. The role of conservative media is entirely unmentioned; deBoer acts as if Americans just Became Nativist because they got sick of seeing Venezuelans—which is certainly true for some people—and ignores the role played by a coordinated, decades-long campaign to shift public opinion on immigration.

I don’t mean to suggest that Americans were duped or even manipulated into embracing immigration restriction, or that this is entirely a failure of messaging and not of policy. The asylum system is outdated and, yes, flawed—though not, as deBoer claims, because it’s abused by people who file fraudulent claims that “that no one sincerely believes fit our asylum law.” The low asylum grant rate is largely because asylum seekers, unlike criminal defendants, aren’t given free, government-appointed counsel if they can’t afford legal representation. I’ve sat in courtrooms and watched people describe experiences of persecution and torture in their home country in ways that would lead to an asylum grant if only they had the right language. This, coupled with the fact that asylum seekers can’t even apply for work permits until their case has been pending for at least six months, has led to the situation playing out in cities across the country now: thousands of poor, vulnerable people working under the table for a pittance, relying on charity and, in cities like New York, government resources to keep them afloat until a judge decides whether they can leave or stay.

Assimilation is a secondary concern for people for whom just getting by is a daily struggle. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to help immigrants acclimate to their new environs—but deBoer never actually puts forth a plan for doing so. Instead, he complains that immigrants don’t want to assimilate, liberals don’t want to encourage their assimilation, and we’re all worse off as a result. His argument relies on a flawed reading of history and a complete misunderstanding of the law. The Ellis Island era, if we want to call it that, is actually two distinct periods. Half of it was a free-for-all of unlimited European migration. Some people were sent back, yes, but there were no numerical limits on entry for white Europeans. After 1924, however, the Ellis Island era was characterized by immigration restriction so severe that in 1939, a German ship carrying Jewish refugees was turned away. Is this the legal, orderly system to which deBoer thinks we should return?

Assimilation, ultimately, is just a thing that happens. I suppose you could say I care about this issue because I am an immigrant, and maybe that makes this a particularly sore subject for me. I learned English at school and from watching Full House; some people are surprised Spanish is my first language. My dad learned English from listening to conservative talk radio, and now whenever we go out to dinner and the server asks how everything was, he gestures towards his empty plate and says I hated it, ha ha, just kidding, it was fantastic, in the way American dads do.

1. barring entry to “idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded persons, epileptics, insane persons, and persons who have been insane within five years previous; persons who have had two or more attacks of insanity at any time previously; paupers; persons likely to become a public charge; professional beggars; persons afflicted with tuberculosis or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease; persons not comprehended within any of the foregoing excluded classes who are found to be and are certified by the examining surgeon as being mentally or physically defective, such mental or physical defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living,” etc.

2. concerns about “mongrelization” and racial degeneration were huge at this time, as was the panic over Anglo-Saxon or Nordic “race suicide”

3. and was since rehired, I believe