Angel Island

Angel Island is the largest island in the San Francisco Bay and best known as an immigration station that operated between 1910 and 1940. The main gateway to the United States on the Pacific seaboard, Angel Island was a major point of landing for Asian immigrants, particularly the Chinese.

At the Angel Island Immigration Station, newcomers went through interviews with immigration officers, medical inspection, and temporary detention in accordance with American immigration law. Some of them were denied admission and sent back to their country of origin. Angel Island illuminates the selective manner in which the United States admitted ethnically and culturally diverse immigrants to the nation in the first half of the 20th century.

By the early 20th century, Congress had passed a series of immigration laws that provided for the exclusion and deportation of foreigners on the grounds of prostitution, poverty, criminal offenses, contagious diseases, and subversive political beliefs. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in particular prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers into the United States. The Angel Island Immigration Station was built in January 1910 largely for the purpose of enforcing the Chinese exclusion laws, though the station processed other Asian, European, and Latino/a immigrants as well.

The implementation of immigration law at Angel Island consisted of several steps. When a vessel arrived in the port of San Francisco, a team of United States immigration and medical officers examined the condition of passengers and determined who could land instantly and who needed further inspection at the landing station. While cabin passengers, mostly European visitors or white American citizens, received inspection in the privacy of their rooms on the ship and were usually allowed to land without difficulty, steerage passengers, most likely to be Asian immigrants, endured humiliating and exhaustive public medical examination at Angel Island. Immigrants were also interrogated about their eligibility to enter the country. Europeans, returning residents who had proper documentation, and Japanese and Korean women who were joining their husbands in America were admitted relatively easily. Chinese immigrants, however, experienced longer and more detailed hearings because of the Chinese exclusion laws.

While their applications for admission were being processed, immigrants were detained at racially segregated residential facilities on Angel Island. At detention barracks, husbands and wives were separated and not allowed to see each other until they were admitted to the United States or ordered to return to their homeland. Mothers were allowed to stay with their children [Page 235]who were under the age of 12, but boys over 12 were detained in the men's section. Life in detention was characterized by boredom and anxiety. Immigrants spent their time gambling, reading newspapers and books, or playing sports in the yards. Some detainees expressed their frustration by writing poems on the walls of barracks.

The Angel Island Immigration Station has been popularly called the Ellis Island of the West, but there were important distinctions between Angel Island and the landing station in New York. Ellis Island mainly processed immigrants from Europe, and most of them spent only a few hours or at most a few days at the station. Immigrants were selectively refused admission, but the overall purpose of Ellis Island was to let them in the country. Angel Island, by contrast, was designed chiefly for the reception of Asian immigrants, and its foremost purpose was the exclusion of Asians deemed undesirable. Also, detention on Angel Island could last for as long as weeks and even more than a year.

...