People from around the globe
have been immigrating to America since it’s founding.
It’s made up of immigrants.
Many seeking greater opportunity in pursuit of the American dream.
No matter your background, chances are you’re a descendent of an immigrant.
You may have heard of New York’s Ellis Island,
where millions of immigrants passed the Statue of Liberty to reach the U.S.
But do you know Angel Island, the Ellis Island of the West?
Question, what is Angel Island?
And what stories does this small island have to tell?
So I’m going to Angel Island in San Francisco and meeting with Ben Lee…
a Chinese American whose father originally immigrated here in 1915.
What is Angel Island?
Angel Island is a multi-layer history of California.
It’s Ellis island with a little asterisk, that it was really not
for welcoming folks to enter in, but really say hey it’s a gate here.
The first major wave of Chinese immigration
occurred in the mid to late 19th Century,
when over 300,000 people crossed the Pacific to work as laborers,
most notably on the transcontinental railroad and in the mining industry.
Well, the history of the Chinese coming is long since they started in the 1820s.
Subsequent was the gold rush, subsequently was the Chinese railroad.
But by the late 1800s,
racial discrimination began to infiltrate federal policy,
as the American public rallied against the newest immigrants
out of racist anxiety and job concerns.
And then all of a sudden there was a big movement - the Chinese must go,
and because we were taking away jobs and we were different. 1882 the only law
in US government was passed that targeted a specific ethnic group
the Chinese, from coming in to America.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law on May 6th, 1882 and was
designed to restrict free immigration and prohibit the Chinese.
And by 1910, Angel Island had become a primary detention center
for East Asian immigrants.
Officers were tasked with enforcing the law and processing
more than 300,000 people, over 100,000 of them Chinese.
But out of 300,000, it was very much the folks that were not Chinese
had a much easier time coming, very much patterned after Ellis Island.
Whereas the Chinese, the saying goes we were guilty until proven innocent,
because of what we were considered as false identity.
- You have a personal connection to this? - Yes
Can you tell me about that?
My father when he was 15 years old thought he was coming
for the Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco.
Little did he know, at 15 years old that
he was gonna end up at Angel Island. And he was here under an assumed name,
that we think is his name still, but he had a paper brother.
A paper son or daughter is a term used for Chinese born immigrants
who used false papers stating that they were blood relatives to American citizens.
To better understand what they went through,
I’m meeting with park ranger Ben Fenkell.
So can you tell me, what were the conditions like for someone who
crossed the sea and is detained here, living here?
Conditions were really cramped. You picked a bed that was open.
Intimidating. Scary, stressful place. You had people in here who didn’t speak
the same languages as you so often you were here feeling like you were alone
even though you were in a space with up to 60 people.
Odors and smells and levels of hygiene.
And people getting up in the middle of the night to use restrooms.
There were no ladders to bunks, so people were climbing up and down
to get to their bunks. It wasn’t a great place,
but it was the only place they had while they were being detained here.
You see a lot of people come in, a lot of students.
What do you tell them
why this is important to understand what happened here?
If they look at all the stories and things they will find in the news today.
Online, TV, newspapers.
If they look at those stories and find stories of immigration,
they are going to realize those stories that they're reading about today
are stories that basically happened here 100 years ago.
So hopefully they're making the connections of the past and present
and making better choices for our country.
To help cope, many detainees carved poems in the walls.
Even if it is built of jade, it is turned into a cage.
This was behind a wall in a bathroom
so no one really knew this was here for like fifty years.
And so to see this,
you can kind of feel what it might have been like to some degree.
I can’t possibly come here and really understand
what it would have been like 100 years ago.
Leaving your family, going across the sea for the first time,
coming to a place and not knowing what’s going to happen.
But the imprint of those words that tried to be hidden,
but history had a way of finding them again.
Officials here didn’t really want them to be seen, put putty in that.
But over time that actually preserved them.
Decades later, the paint peeled away
and we see the thoughts and feelings that people had here.
That’s what I’ll remember.