American History Hit - Ellis Island

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

From the 1880s to the 1920s the United States experienced a huge wave of immigration. People fleeing poverty and political instability in Europe, plus a huge demand for labour in the US, meant record numbers of people came to America. Most arrived by ship and were processed on Ellis Island, in New York harbour - an immigration station opened in 1892 when the facility on Manhattan couldn't deal with the numbers coming in. Vincent Cannato tells Don what happened on Ellis Island and the story of the people who, in passing through it, became Americans. From which 40 percent of the US population today are descendants.Produced and mixed by Benjie Guy. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's a cold winter's morning in New York Harbor, January 1907. Hundreds of European migrants are disembarking a ferry at Ellis Island.

They had arrived by ship the previous night after days, if not weeks, at sea. Healthy first and second class passengers were processed on arrival and immediately allowed to enter the United States. But those who warranted at further examination joined the passengers in steerage, the cheapest tickets, in the wait for the ferry, to be processed at the immigration station on Ellis Island. Stepping off the ferry, the young and the old, single men, whole families, walked down a gangplank with the few bags that contain all their worldly possessions. They dropped their bags in the baggage room and head up a large winding staircase to the Great Hall. Unbeknownst to the new arrivals, this is their first test.

At the top of the stairs, uniformed public health officers watch for heavy breathing, and anyone showing physical or mental impairment. In the Great Hall, everyone has asked their name, place of origin, and how they plan to support themselves. Doctors quickly assessed whether they warrant further medical examination. Those that do could be on the island overnight or for months, then either allowed in or sent back to their country of origin. But the vast majority passed through with ease. They are some of the 1.2 million immigrants that enter the U.S. through Ellis Island that year.

After inspection, everyone heads down a staircase with three aisles. Those being detained go down the middle. Those heading north or to New York down the left. Those heading west or south down the right. At the bottom is a post office, a railway ticket booth, and a place to change money. They could inform their family back home. They'd made it. Their journey could continue and their new life in America could begin.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of American History Hit. I'm your host, Don Wildman. It is a simple fact of life that this nation, the United States of America, was built by immigrants. All the way back to the earliest arrivals at Jamestown and Plymouth Colony. And honestly, if you think about prehistory, even the first Americans either marched over or sailed over in pursuit of a better way of life, if not those mammoths they so dearly depended on. But as obvious an idea as this is, that a new world requires new arrivals,

we are also a people that struggles with the notion, the sense that some of us belong here and others do not, even while our own ancestors may have faced the same anti-immigration fervor. It's a pendulum that swings to and fro in American society. And today we'll discuss it all with Vincent Canato, author of American Passage, the History of Ellis Island. He's an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where he teaches various subjects, including New York City, history and immigration. Vincent Canato, greetings, welcome to American history hit. Please tell me, you're a Yankees fan living in Massachusetts. I definitely am, Don, one of those rare birds. Nice. There we go. We're starting off on a good foot. Immigration, a huge subject. Every day on the

news, I would venture to say it's probably the most written about subject in all of American history. Fair to say? Yes, I think it's one of those common, threads, whether you're talking about today in 2023 or whether you're talking about 20 years ago or 100 years ago, it's a common thread in American history, which is who are these newcomers, where are they from, and, you know, what do we do with them? How many should we take in? This is a question that I think the more people study, the more people will understand that what we're going through today is very similar to what people in the past went through in America. From 1820 to 1975, I mean, way more than a century there.

47 million people emigrated to the United States. That's a massive amount of people, a gigantic sector of American society. I mean, never mind all the many generations who came from that. 35 million who came from Europe did so before 1922, or 1924. I mean, these are facts and figures that we are so used to. I mean, this is almost a cliche. It really is. You know, send us your poor and you're tired.

all of that Statue of Liberty passage. And yet, American society has never really completely owned up to this fact. I mean, it's a weird situation where generations come and they get used to being, you know, the real Americans versus those who are coming from abroad. And we're going to talk about all of this in terms of a very famous site that has to do with American immigration. Not the only one, but Ellis Island, which sits right smack in the middle of New York Harbor and really is the symbol of the this American immigration. But I want to ask you, how conscious of immigration as a factor in American society were the founders of this nation? How much did they cope with and understand that this was going to be such a big theme of our nations? Very little, I think. Immigration doesn't appear in the Declaration, the Constitution. It doesn't appear in any of the founding documents, really. It was a very small issue back then. Like you said, you started your figures with 1820. we only see large numbers of immigrants, waves of immigrants coming in the mid, starting in the mid-19th century. So yes, there were Germans. Ben Franklin in the late 1700s complained about Germans in Pennsylvania who didn't speak English.

So there was always that. But in our founding documents, there's very little about immigration. There is the idea that a president has to be a native-born American. So we can't, even to this day, we can't have an immigrant who's a president. But that's one of the few places where you see the idea of immigration cropping in. When does it start to be officially legislated? You know, when do they realize they've got to kind of get organized about this? This is a very tricky question. Before the 1880s, immigration was left up to the states, individual states, had their own laws and how to deal with immigration.

It's not until the 1880s, 1890s that the federal government begins to take over the regulation of who can come into the country, who can stay. So a lot of the early laws, these state laws, come out of kind of older British laws about vagrants, about people, basically poor laws. These are individual towns or localities who could kick people out, who could decide who could come in. So there are some laws in states like New York and Massachusetts in the early 1800s that sort of decide who can come in and who can't come in. So there really was no official agency in the federal government for this. to begin with? No, not until the 1890s. Do you actually have a federal immigration service? Today, we think of it as just a classic. We think of it used to be called the INS, but the immigration service as a federal responsibility. But prior to that, no, it was left up to the states.

Ellis Island becomes the main portal for everyone in the late 1800s. How were immigrants processed before Ellis Island? What was there in New York that did this? So before Ellis Island in New York, there was a place called Castle Garden, which was at the tip of Manhattan in Battery Park. It was an old fort that had been converted into, well, it was a concert hall and then became an immigration station. But it was an immigration station run by the state of New York in conjunction with Irish and German immigrant aid societies. And that was the immigration station from the 1850s down to about 1890.

And why did things change? Was it the sheer numbers of people who were covered? It's a combination. Yes, it's the sheer numbers of people that were coming in the late 19th century. That's one reason. Two, this is after the Civil War. So the Civil War was fought of Union wins. So the idea of a nation, that America is a nation. By the late 19th century, it's also the Second Industrial Revolution. So the federal government is starting to regulate business. You're starting to see antitrust laws come in. So, and I argue that immigration regulation is kind of part of that. It's the federal government's early attempts to regulate. business or labor because immigration was often seen as a labor issue. Obviously, it's a very relevant subject in contemporary society, but I've always wondered about the dynamic of immigration. How much was it driven by, you know, those poor and those tired, those weary coming to our shores desperate for a new way of life versus America kind of recruiting immigration, you know, bringing people here? It's a push-pull, isn't it?

Yes, so that's exactly the term that we use, push and pull. Immigrants are both pushed out of where they live, their native lands. They're pushed out because of lack of economic opportunities, natural disasters, oppressive government policies that target certain groups. I'm thinking of Jews in Eastern Europe, for instance, who are leaving because of the pogroms. And then they're also pulled to America. They're attracted to America. They're attracted to America because of the opportunities,

because of the economy, the idea that there's jobs and they can have a better standard of living. And they're attracted also by just general ideas that this is a place of a country of freedom, a place where they might live with more freedom than they had in their homelands. But America also needed and needs workers from abroad. I mean, this was a labor need being filled. So I've always wondered about how much America went looking for workers and turned the spigot on in one direction one supply versus another. Is that a big part of the process? It's part of it. But there's competing interests going on here because you have American labor,

American unions who don't want immigrant laborers brought over here. They want to protect American jobs. And this goes back to the late 1800s. So I don't think it's the government so much, although, you know, around the Civil War time, you see that the government is encouraging immigration to America. But it's often business. people who are kind of looking for laborers and using networks, informal networks to recruit and attract workers to come over. What I mean by that is someone comes over. They get a job in a factory. And then they've got, you know, cousins and brothers and neighbors back home. And they write a letter saying, come on over. You can come and get a job here. Yeah. You have,

for Italian immigrants, you have kind of middlemen called Padrones. These are Italian immigrants themselves who work for American businesses who recruit Italian immigrants to come over. And he's kind of a middleman between the two. So rather than just sort of government policy, government saying, you know, come over here, it's often much more informal networks that help to recruit immigrant laborers. And I think the same thing today. I mean, today, immigration is much more family-based, but it's, you know, it's word of mouth. It's someone's brother is here and they have a job and they bring over their brother back in the homeland. And, you know, they, these networks bring over immigrants. You and I were both from this area above New York City,

Westchester County. I am always aware of the need for immigrant labor because so much of the infrastructure that was built in the Hudson Valley of New York was done so, you know, in that period, 1880 to 1920, that period of time. And so much labor was immigrant labor. Yeah, I mean, these are my ancestors, Italian immigrants. They were Italian immigrants and their skill, they were stone masons. So, you know, all of them were masons who came over and they built buildings, they built public works, they built homes, private homes. If you go down to Kensico Dam, down to Valhalla's great dam, it's a beautiful work of stonanship. My ancestors did not work on that, but that's a great example of her immigrant laborers.

Here's a factoid. The Croton Dam, which was the original source of water for the aqueduct that brought the water into New York City in the 19th century, the second largest hand-hewn stone structure in the world next to the great pyramids of Egypt. I mean, these are extraordinary structures that were built, never mind the aqueduct and all the masonry involved in that. Yeah, think of the Brooklyn Bridge, like Brooklyn Bridge in the late 1800s. This is, you know, how did you build this bridge? You had Irish immigrant laborers who were living just a few blocks away and came over and helped to build this magnificent piece of public sculpture, so to speak in public work. Sure. You needed workers who had built, whose ancestors had built

cathedrals and amazing domes and things over in Europe. Suddenly those same kind of structures, those same skills were being called upon here and we needed the people to do it. So let's talk about Ellis Island. Anyone who lives in New York or has lived in New York knows that it sits out there, you know, over there by the Statue of Liberty, very famous by name alone, never mind the fact that it's the location of so many people who came to the United States. I mean, it's in the movies. It's everything. It's kind of a cliche, but it's one of those that really holds up to scrutiny. An enormous amount of people came through that island. Tell me about that period of time. Well, this is one of the peak periods of immigration. So the late 1800s

into the 1920s. And about 75% of immigrants coming to America during this period come through New York and come through Ellis Island. There are about 12 billion immigrants that came through Ellis Island. During the peak year for immigration in the early 20th century, 1907, 1.2 million immigrants came to America. Now, to give you a sense, America was about a quarter of the size and population that it is today. So as a proportion of the population, that's almost like having five million immigrants come today in one year. These days, we take in about a million legal immigrants every year. So huge numbers of immigrants coming through, and they need to be processed. They need to be processed by the federal government, which in the 1880s and 1890s takes over the control of immigration. And so they go

through, they pass through the inspection station at Ellis Island. There are smaller inspection stations at other ports for immigrants who go into other ports, but Ellis Island is the biggest, again, 75% of immigrants come through there. That's why we talk about Ellis Island. How did it become the place? I mean, why Ellis Island? Why not Philadelphia? Why not Boston? The answer is it's why New York, right? Why do people come to New York? The example I usually give people is if you think about airlines, airline flight, you know, is it cheaper to fly to Los Angeles or is it cheaper to fly to Sacramento, right? It's cheaper to travel to a bigger hub. So New York is the hub of shipping, of transatlantic shipping. So it's usually the cheapest ticket to get to America is to go through to New York. Not everyone who came to Ellis Island and came to New York. stayed in New York. Sure. It's a chicken and egg situation here. You have this enormous need of people to come to the United States. What was driving this immigration so furiously during this period of time, 1880 onward? The second industrial revolution here. So you've got, this is the period of

factories, industrialization, you know, think about mining, think about all kinds of industrial work that needed unskilled and semi-skilled laborers. So there's this great demand for laborers. You know, labor, this great need for labor. And on the whole, these industrial jobs, they paid more than an immigrant would have made in their home countries. So the idea was that they could go and do this work, and some of it was not very good work, not very nice work, but they could make more money and sort of increase their standard of living somewhat. You know, rags to riches stories, streets paved with gold or maybe an exaggeration. But for most immigrants, it was about a slow and steady rise and maybe a better opportunity for their children. That's what immigration was about.

It's much less about getting rich quick. How did this process develop? It was interesting what you said before about the fact that this used to be handled by the states, but suddenly it had to be more centralized. So the United States had to do something kind of unprecedented, I suppose, in maybe human history and figure out how to process a whole lot of people in a short amount of time. Yes. One of the myths about Ellis Island is that everyone got a medical exam. You know, that there was, you couldn't do that when you had thousands of immigrants every day coming through. So what the inspection service did is created a system of inspection. So immigrants were, once they got to the island, they were constantly being watched.

You had doctors and inspectors looking. Were immigrants limping? Were they, you know, hiding a hand that might be deformed? Were they muttering to themselves? Maybe they had some mental problems. They were constantly being watched. They go through a single file line where doctors are. are looking, again, looking, examining, asking questions, often through an interpreter. They're looking

for any signs that something might be off about an immigrant. If there is, they get a chalk mark on their coat, and they're set aside for further inspection. So 20% of immigrants are set aside for further inspection. 80% go through Ellis Island in a matter of a couple of hours. That's about it. But 20% are detained for further inspection, further interviews, to see if they meet the criteria for admission. I'll be back with more from Vincent Canato after this short break. So more people than we think came in than were sent back. It's kind of a myth that many, many people were rejected. Correct. At the end of the day, less than 2% of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island were turned away.

So that means if you got to Ellis Island, you had a 98 plus percent chance of eventually arriving. Having said that, that 20% who were detained for a while, some were detained for a few days and then let in. others were detained for a few weeks. Some were detained for a few months, and there are a few, very few stories of people being detained for longer, sometimes year, two years. But most of the people who got there came in. Now, the reason for that is there was also an inspection stations over in Europe at the European ports that were created by the steamship companies.

So before an immigrant could buy a ticket and get on a ship, that immigrant had to be inspected and approved by the steamship companies because the steamship companies would be fined if they brought over an immigrant who was rejected. So they had an interest in only bringing over those immigrants they would think could get through the inspection. So were the boats themselves, I mean the ships that came over full of immigrants or how did they even find their way to the island?

Well, this is part of the transatlantic shipping trade. So you have, you know, think about the movie Titanic. That's always the great example. People have watched that. You have multi layers on a ship, just like today's plane. You know, today you have first class, business class, coach. So in the old days with these ships, you had first class, second class, third class steerage. And, you know, first class would be more expensive.

Steerage was the cheapest. So most immigrants came over in steerage or third class. A few of them had a little bit more money. It might have come over in first or second class. So these are ships bringing not just immigrants, but also tourists, travelers, diplomats, businessmen, whatever it may be. Some of the ships might have also carried goods with them from Europe over. And what would happen is the ship would come into New York Harbor, would be boarded in the harbor before it got to the mainland by inspection officials who would look at first and second class passengers. Just a brief inspection.

If they were fine, the ship would go on. It would dock in Manhattan. These are huge ships, so they couldn't dock at Ellis Island. first and second class passengers did not go to Ellis Island. They were free to leave unless there was some problem in that initial inspection. So Ellis Island was really for the third class steerage passengers who would then get on a ferry and then take the ferry over Ellis Island to be inspected. When they arrived, they were lined up. I mean, you can do this as you visit today as a tourist.

It lined up and literally began to process these people. This is the famous moment that we hear so much about, kind of apocryphal, I suppose, where people's names were changed and so forth, that stamp would sort of dictate the rest of your life. Any truth to this at all? No, it's probably one of the greatest myths about Ellis Island, which is the name change myth. You know, you hear people, I've heard people for years talking about how their grandparents or great-grandparents had their names changed at Ellis Island. But looking at it, there's no possible way for a name to be legally changed at Ellis Island. That's just not what the process was.

there was no place for any legal name changes. So the truth is that lots of immigrants did have their names changed. You know, they were Americanized, they were shortened. But oftentimes it was the immigrants themselves who changed their names, who shortened their names. They wanted to fit in. They wanted to become Americans. The idea that these kind of evil inspectors would change people's names, it turns out to be one of those myths, historical myths. I know of the Sean Ferguson's story. It's a, it's a funny joke about this that. There's a Jewish immigrant named Sean Ferguson. How do you get that name?

Well, he comes to Ellis Island. He stands in line. He's really scared. He's really nervous. He gets the immigration inspector who asks him what his name is. And he says in Yiddish, Shunfegesen. And the immigration inspector writes, Sean Ferguson next. And it gives you the sense that there's a vaudeville character to some of this myth,

that this became kind of handed down through comedy and lore over the years. People could be detained for quite some time, though. That's true, yes? Yes, they could be detained for months. So what would happen is, let's say, you were declared to be sent back. You could appeal that decision. And you would appeal that decision to the commissioner at Ellis Island, and then you could appeal it to Washington. Now, that took time. So during that whole appeal, you would have to stay at Ellis Island. Now, sometimes these were tricky appeal. Sometimes they would get caught up in the bureaucracy. Sometimes politicians got involved. Occasionally. there would be legal issues involved. So this could go on for weeks, maybe months, and you would be detained. There were a few cases of immigrants who were detained for much longer, though. I mean, and families would be split up. I mean, obviously, some would be taken.

People came as families, and some would be allowed in, and some had to be detained. There's a story, an anecdote I read about a woman from Italy who was a very good example of this, you know, trying time of families being. split apart. So the story, which I'd found in the archives, was a woman named Gemma Zetello. Her father was actually already here. It was often the case that the father would come first and work to save money to bring the rest of his family. So she came over with her mother and I think two brothers. One brother died at Ellis Island, very sadly, from disease. She was deemed an imbecile. So she had failed the intelligence test. Now, we don't really know, it's hard to say from our vantage point, what was wrong with her, if anything. But nevertheless, the immigration officials did not want to let her in.

So her family had to leave her at Ellis Island and go to Ohio where the father was, where he was working in a factory. She was stuck at Ellis Island because this was World War I, and now they weren't shipping immigrants back to Europe because of U-boats, the dangers of transatlantic shipping. So she was detained for about two years, I believe, two plus years. And then as soon as World War one ended, she was shipped back to Italy. And I found a letter from the 1930s that her father wrote, so this is 15 years later, to Franklin Roosevelt, to the president, asking, can she be brought over? Can we reunite her with her family? And the answer was no. And she was never able to join her family. So they never got back together? Nope. My God, what a tragedy. I found some of the descendants.

And one of it because they lived in the same town in Ohio. And it's an unusual name. And he said he had always heard that his father had an aunt who was back in Italy and never came over, but he never knew the reason why. She was living in a home in Italy. So it was clear that she did have some difficulty, some intellectual disability, probably, because she was even as an adult, she was living in a home. But the father was arguing that she was being abused there and they wanted to bring her over. But the immigrants said no. I mean, one of the reasons was this is the time of the year of eugenics. The idea was that we don't want to bring people over who are, quote, unquote, defective because if they come over, they're going to have children, and those children will be defective.

And therefore, we will just have generations of imbeciles, so to speak. The vast majority of immigrants in those times were white Europeans. This was a conscious policy, or was this just sort of the way it went? This is mostly due to patterns, if we're talking about prior to the 1920s, there were immigrants at this time from black immigrants from the Caribbean. So during this period, about 100, 150,000 black immigrants coming from Jamaica, Barbados. There were also other immigrants coming from the Middle East, places like Lebanon, Syria. But for the most part, these are European immigrants. They're coming over. This is also the period where you begin to see first Chinese exclusion and then

broadly speaking Asian exclusion. So you are seeing strictures on immigrants coming over first China and then as we get into 1917 and the 1920s from the rest of Asia. So that's sort of the beginnings of exclusion start with Asians. So after someone is cleared, they walk out of Ellis Island, get on a ferry and start their lives. Is that sort of how it went? That's how it went. They met with, maybe met with family members. They got some American dollars. They exchanged some money. And they were off. They got on a ferry to Manhattan. They got on a ferry to Jersey where there was a train station that could take them out to the

Midwest or to Pennsylvania or Jersey or wherever they were going. Are there statistics about that? I mean, did the vast majority of people stay put in New York or was it really a diaspora? A lot of people stayed in New York. New York is booming at this time. And a lot of the population growth is our immigrants. But, you know, they're going all over the place. They're going to New England, Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia.

They don't go to the South very much. That's important. Most immigrants are staying in the Northeast or the Midwest. A few of them going out to the. further west, but not to the south. When did your ancestors come over? I'm curious. Some in the 1890s, and then my grandfather came over in 1907, I think. And did you find his records?

I found my grandfather's records. I couldn't find my great-grandfather's records. Genealogies have become very big these days, but there are cases where sometimes there isn't paperwork and you can't find them. What about other points of entry around the country? I mean, at the same time as Ellis Island, people are getting into other places as well? I mean, was the southern border an issue at all in those days? Less of an issue. I mean, it's going to become more of an issue after World War I in the 1920s.

There's the northern border as well. But there are some stations along the border. But we're not talking about large numbers at this stage. That's really going to start to happen in the 1920s where you see Mexican immigrants coming up, coming over because there's a need, a demand for especially agricultural labor in the West. When did Ellis Island become obsolete? I mean, talk about the decline of its usage. After World War I in the early 1920s, Congress passes a couple of quota bills. So there's a move towards restriction of immigration. The quotas are going to set quotas per country, and they're

going to be pretty restrictive, especially for southern and eastern Europe. And what that does is really shrink down the number of immigrants that are going to come in any one year. And then on top of that in 1924, the government creates the visa system that we have to this day. And the visa system is you go, if you want to come to America, you go to the American consulate in your country. And first all, you see whether there's room in the quota. If there is, they inspect you and, you know, ask you questions. And then if you're fine, you get a visa and you come to this country. That means you don't need a big inspection port at Ellis Island. So Ellis Island's relevance starts to decline in the 1920s with the quotas and with the visas. It becomes more of a deportation center than an immigration

center. Yeah. So as immigrants are being deported and deportation is a feature of immigration law before the 1920s, but it becomes a place where people who are going to be sent back, deported, they're detained at Ellis Island before they're sent home, especially after World War II. It's famous cases of people being detained for a year, two years or longer at Ellis Island before they're sent back home. I imagine, I mean, it's a part of your family lore, you know, as an Italian immigrant family, to know the importance of this phase of American history. Having researched it and written this book, it must cause a great deal of reflection about the nature of the country today, the difference of attitudes towards immigrants and so forth. Yeah, I think what I try to tell people

is that it's important to recognize that immigration has always been a feature of American society. Now, in some eras more than others, I think you have to remember that in the 1960s and 1950s, 60s, and 70s, immigration was at a low peak. I mean, there was in 1970, only about 5% of Americans were foreign-born. But the idea of who gets to come into this country, that's an issue that's very American. It's been debated for, you know, over 150-plus years. So it's part of who we are. The immigration is part of who we are, but so is. the debate over immigration. And it's not, there are no easy answers to, you know, to these questions. So it's important to discuss it, important to debate it. It's important to, you know,

understand the importance of immigration in our history and what immigrants have done. But as we see today, there's also issues about borders. What's the meaning of a border? Ellis Island is part of that, right? The idea that we're going to sort of decide who comes in, although Ellis Island is an island inside America. It's a kind of a fictional border. And so that becomes a very important idea, which is who gets to say, you know, who comes in and under what criteria. These days it's also a very tangible effect because it's hard to get workers. You know, we're seeing it very, very directly in American society today, the effect of restrictions in immigration. It's right on the ground.

Yeah. Immigration is always bound up with labor issues and the need for immigrant labor and conflicts between immigrant labor. and conflicts between immigrant laborers and native-born laborers, the questions of what's the economic impact of immigration, which economists have been debating for a long time, and it's a complicated issue. So, yeah, I mean, by and large, immigrants add to the economy. However, there are some groups of people here who are hurt by immigrant labor. Those tend to be lower on the education scale. Interestingly enough, immigrants who immigrated earlier, tend to be hurt by newer immigrants. There's sort of economic competition there. But a lot of our

immigration today, I think people don't realize most immigrants who come come because they get a visa, not a work visa, but a family visa. They're coming to reunite with family members who are already here. Now, they're also working. That doesn't mean they're not working, but the visas they get are family reunification visas. And that's central part of our system today. It's a dynamic that will always be a factor in American society. Always was, always will. It's always a matter of figuring out what's the limitations, how to restrict and how to process. You have written about this, about the history of this through a great book called American Passage, The History of Ellis Island. Author, Vincent Canato, I am so grateful for you to be with us today. Thanks very much, John. Enjoy the conversation. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.