WHAT THE STATUE OF LIBERTY & ELLIS ISLAND TELL US ABOUT IMMIGRATION

I’m a descendant of immigrants. Most likely you are, too. When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, 2.5 million colonists and enslaved people lived in what would eventually become the United States, not to mention the 4 million Indigenous Peoples whose ancestors had lived here for centuries. If the new nation had then slammed its doors to outsiders, most of the 340 million people living in this country today wouldn’t be here. That’s what the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tell us about immigration in the last 135 years of our nation’s history. Of the more than 26 million people who came to the United States between 1880 and 1924, almost half entered through New York City, where they would have seen the Statue of Liberty before heading to Ellis Island for immigration procedures. It was one of the biggest migrations in modern history.  

What’s the Statue of Liberty National Monument?

If you’re like me, you may not remember much from your school days about the Statue of Liberty, other than that she came from France and served as a beacon of hope to immigrants, something along the lines of the “huddled masses.” Before my recent visit, I certainly didn’t know her anti-slavery sentiments, how long it took to create such a colossal figure, or anything about Ellis Island. Even if you’ve been before, you might want to revisit if you haven’t seen the Statue of Liberty Museum, which opened in 2019. Ellis Island, too, has been undergoing continual renovation.

The Statue of Liberty National Monument encompasses both the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Although no admission is charged per se, you must purchase a ferry ticket to get there. Ferries departing from Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan and from Jersey City deliver passengers to both Liberty Island with its iconic statue and to nearby Ellis Island.

Liberty Enlightening the World

“Liberty Enlightening the World” was a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States to commemorate their close friendship since the American Revolution. But the Statue of Liberty has always been about much more.

Creating the Statue of Liberty

Edouard de Laboulaye, a French political intellectual and an expert on the U.S. Constitution, proposed the idea of a commemorative monument in 1865 as the United States approached its centennial. An abolitionist, Laboulaye hoped that the Union’s recent victory in the Civil War would inspire the French to turn against Napoleon’s repressive monarchy and embrace the American ideals of freedom and democracy.

France would finance the statue; Americans would pay for its pedestal. Twenty-one years passed, however, before the concept became reality.

It fell to structural engineer Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel to devise her support system: an ingenious 98-foot inner iron framework. Eiffel, of course, went on to design the Eiffel Tower. He also created numerous bridges, including the Maria Pia Bridge over the Douro River in Porto.

After touring sites in the United States and selecting New York Harbor as the home for Liberty, sculptor Auguste Bartholdi began creating the massive Liberty Enlightening the World in 1876. Her colossal height, weight, and shape posed structural challenges, not to mention the gale-force winds that sometimes rocked the harbor.   

The statue took shape in Paris during the 1870s and 1880s, giving Parisians plenty of time to fall in love with her. They called her the “eighth wonder of the world.”

Creating Liberty’s pedestal

Across the Atlantic, American architect Richard Morris Hunt finalized his plans for the pedestal in 1884. To sustain the massive statue, the pedestal, faced with granite blocks, required concrete walls up to 20 feet thick, the largest mass of poured concrete at the time. In 1885, however, funding for the project dried up and work on the pedestal stopped.

Luckily for America, Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and newspaper publisher, came to the rescue with a fundraising campaign. He promised that every donor would have their name printed in his New York World, regardless of the amount contributed. In five months, 121,000 people donated the $100,000 needed to complete the project. Most donations were less than $1.

That same year, Liberty was disassembled in 1885 and shipped to America in 214 packing crates. Although she was met with a naval parade and great ceremony, the pedestal wasn’t ready for her. She sat in storage for a year.  

Liberty Enlightening the World is a sensation

Finally, in 1886, Liberty Enlightening the World was reassembled atop her pedestal. New York City held its first Ticker-Tape Parade to honor her, with more than one million people attending her dedication.

Standing 151 feet tall from her base to the tip of her torch, she was not only the tallest structure in New York City but also the tallest statue in the world. Sporting an outer flexible copper skin no thicker than two copper pennies placed together and supported by Eiffel’s iron skeleton, she could expand and contract with temperature changes. She could sway in strong winds. She was an architectural marvel.  

What the Statue of Liberty symbolizes

The Mother of Exiles

But it’s her role as the “Mother of Exiles” that resonates with me. That’s what poetess Emma Lazarus called her in a sonnet she wrote in 1883, to help raise money for the pedestal. Today, her sonnet, “The New Colossus,” graces the inner wall of the pedestal, with a replica also in the museum:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

 I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Certainly, Liberty as a welcoming figure was how most immigrants probably viewed her. However, what I’ve gleaned most from perusing the websites of the National Park Service’s Statue of Liberty National Monument and The Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation (the fundraising arm of the two historic landmarks), is what the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tell us about immigration and our fluid reception of newcomers. Policies haven’t always been fair. They were often racist. However, as far as I can tell, most immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island were treated humanely and processed quickly before being released to begin new lives in the New World.

Ellis Island

I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to finally catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty after a harrowing transatlantic voyage by sea. I would have felt elated, but also jittery and apprehensive about going through immigration at Ellis Island. I might have come for a variety of reasons. To pursue religious or political freedom. To escape unemployment or famine. To join family. For love. Or to venture off into the unknown in search of adventure.

Most likely, I wouldn’t have been among the second- and first-class passengers, who were allowed to go through immigration on board ship, therefore circumventing Ellis Island altogether in the official belief that if they could afford an expensive ticket, they had enough money to avoid becoming a public burden. Only if they were sick were they taken to Ellis Island for further observation.

Immigration procedures at Ellis Island

Instead, as a poor passenger in steerage who had traveled in the bowels of the ship, I would have been ferried to Ellis Island for legal and medical examinations, which generally lasted three to five hours. I would have checked my earthly possessions in the baggage room and then trudged upstairs to the Registry Room, where I would have been asked my name, hometown, occupation, destination, and how much money I had–about 31 questions in all.

Doctors would have checked me for signs of illness, including cholera, tuberculosis, mental instability, or trachoma, a highly contagious eye infection that could cause blindness and death.

If I didn’t know English, all the doctors, nurses, and social workers I met would have used interpreters, including those who spoke Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak, German, Yiddish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Swedish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Czech, Spanish, Armenian, Arabic, Dutch, Norwegian and Chinese. As many as 500 employees might have worked on Ellis Island, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants. It was a well-oiled machine.

Assuming I wasn’t among the 20% held for further legal or medical examination, I’d be allowed to exchange money, buy tickets, meet friends and family, and go on with the rest of my life. If I were sick, I would have been transferred to the hospital ward, where I might have recovered before being allowed to leave.

Only 2% going through Ellis Island were denied entry, mostly due to medical reasons like an incurable disease, a disability that rendered them unfit for unskilled labor, fear that they’d become a public burden, or being a suspected cheap contract laborer who might compete with American workers.

Ellis Island as the center of US immigration

Before 1891, each state regulated immigration. The Immigration Act of 1891, however, transferred immigration responsibilities from the states to the federal government. In 1892, Ellis Island opened as the first federal immigration station in the United States. After a fire destroyed the original wooden structure, the present one was completed in 1900.

It couldn’t come soon enough. Although countries like Australia, Argentina, and Canada received immigrants, most people wanted to come to the United States. In the decades following the American Revolution, about 5,000 people immigrated to the United States every year. By the early 1900s, Ellis Island saw that many hopefuls every day. 1907 was its busiest year, with more than one million immigrants processed at Ellis Island.

In all, almost 12 million immigrants were processed on Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954, when the station was closed. But the vast majority came before the mid-1920s. That’s because anti-immigration sentiment and legislation dramatically restricted who could enter the United States. 

What the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tell us about immigration discrimination

It was no secret that desirable immigrants were those from Europe, while those from Eastern Europe, Asia, and other regions faced discrimination. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was probably the country’s most racist immigration policy, creating a total ban on Chinese laborers.

But it’s the Immigration Act of 1924, passed by a vote of 323 to 71 in the House of Representatives, that killed immigration. It established a quota system based on “national origin.” That limited the number of immigrants admitted to the United States from any one country to just two percent, based not on how many were in the country in 1924 but rather according to the U.S. 1890 census. Immigration for Slavic, Italian, and other southern and eastern Europeans, who by the 1900s accounted for 50% of immigrants, was effectively halted.

Another measure in the 1920s that curtailed immigration inspection in the United States was the establishment of embassies around the world. When the necessary paperwork and medical inspections required for immigration could be completed at the consulates, the trip to Ellis Island was no longer necessary.

Instead, Ellis Island became a place mostly for detainees, people suspected of being anarchists or communists, or the 1,000 Germans, Italians, and Japanese people suspected of being enemy aliens during World War II.

By 1953, there were more than 250 employees on Ellis Island for only 237 detainees. Ellis Island closed in 1954.

Visiting the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

You can easily spend half a day at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and their respective museums.

Although you can pay extra to access the Liberty’s pedestal (with 215 steps) or climb the 162 steps (the equivalent of a 20-story building) to her crown, I limited my visit to the statue’s museum. I watched a 10-minute film and learned about the history, construction, and hoopla surrounding our most famous statue, including visual displays of what the statue’s interior looks like and scenes from Bartholdi’s studio.

Ellis Island, which became part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965, tells the story of immigration on three floors of the main building, including the huge Registry Room, a dormitory for detainees, and treasures that immigrants brought from their homeland, mostly donated by the immigrants themselves or their families. For researchers, there’s the Bob Hope Memorial Library; Bob Hope himself was an immigrant, coming through Ellis Island in 1908.

In all, there are 33 buildings on Ellis Island, and work on their restoration is ongoing.

We are a nation of immigrants

I’ve never had any doubt that if I were suffering persecution, war, famine, or violence, I, too, would do anything to bring my family to safety. What the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tell us about immigration is one of assimilation, how our nation is culturally rich because of a long influx of nationalities bringing their own cuisine, languages, music, literature, art, and ideas.

In our land of immigrants, it’s been estimated that close to 40% of all current U.S. citizens can trace at least one of their ancestors to Ellis Island.

I’m one of them. From a search of passenger records, I found that my paternal grandmother, Maria Pfisterer, came from her hometown of Schwaz. Austria, in 1911 on a ship called the Kroonland, when she was 19 years old. She came after meeting my American-born German grandfather in Innsbruck. She came for love. They married and had eight children. (You can search passenger records of people passing through New York here.)

2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Lady Liberty’s job is far from over. To combat xenophobia, nationalism, and intolerance, this Mother of Exiles, a symbol of freedom and liberty, must continue to hold her torch high and enlighten the world.