My Great-Grandparents Came Without Papers, the Family Story Argument Answered

Somebody at your table has said it, probably over a holiday dinner, probably with a fork in one hand and real feeling in the voice. "My great-grandparents came over with nothing. No papers, no visa, no lawyer. They got off the boat and they were Americans. So who are we to ask anybody else for paperwork?"

I want to treat that sentence with respect, because it is rarely a bad-faith argument. It is a love story, told by someone who is proud of where he came from. And it is mostly wrong on the history. Let me show you, gently and with the dates, what actually happened at the dock, and why honoring those great-grandparents points the other way from where the argument takes it.

The argument at its warmest

State it as its best defenders would. One: the people who built this country, millions of them, arrived in the great wave of immigration from the 1880s to the 1920s. Two: they did not apply abroad for permission. They bought a ticket, crossed the Atlantic, and walked off the ship. Three: no consulate gave them a visa, because there was no such thing as a visa requirement for most of that period. Four: they were poor, often frightened, often fleeing hardship or persecution, and they worked hard and raised children who became citizens, soldiers, teachers and mayors. Five: therefore the current system, with its forms, waits and caps, is a betrayal of the tradition that made the family, and anyone who defends it has forgotten where he came from.

There is truth in nearly every sentence. The immigrants of that era were mostly poor. Many were fleeing hardship. Their children did become Americans in every sense. And the sense of gratitude behind the story is exactly right. So let us look at the one claim that is carrying all the weight, the claim that nobody was checking, because that is where the history says otherwise.

What actually happened at the dock

Start with the paper that every traveler did have. A federal law of 1819, the Steerage Act, required the captain of every ship arriving from abroad to hand customs officials a list of every passenger: name, age, sex, occupation and country of origin. A ship's manifest is a document. It was compiled at the port of departure, and at the port of arrival an inspector held your name up against it. Your great-grandparents did not arrive without papers. They arrived with an entry in a record that the government required, and the record is why genealogy websites can tell you today which ship they were on.

Then came the inspection. For the first part of the nineteenth century, the states did most of the receiving, and the largest station was Castle Garden in New York, run by the state. In the mid-1870s the Supreme Court struck down state immigration laws, and the federal courts, as our post on Before Ellis Island, the States Ran Immigration and the Court Stopped Them explains, ended the states' role, and Congress took over. The Immigration Act of 1882, signed on August 3 of that year, imposed a head tax of fifty cents on each arriving immigrant and barred the entry of convicts, of people then labelled lunatics and idiots, and of any person unable to support himself without becoming a public charge. The language is blunt and dated, and the principle is clear: a person could be turned away.

The great federal statute came in 1891. The Immigration Act of 1891, passed on March 3, created a federal superintendent of immigration and put the whole business of inspection under federal control. It added new excluded classes: those with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease, polygamists, persons convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude, and, again, those likely to become a public charge. It also barred anyone whose passage had been paid for by someone else and who had been induced to come by promises of work. And it made the steamship companies responsible for the cost of carrying back any passenger who was refused, which gave the shipping lines a powerful reason to screen people at the origin.

Ellis Island opened on January 1, 1892, under that law. The first immigrant processed there, the story goes, was a teenager from Ireland named Annie Moore. The facility burned in 1897 and reopened in 1900. Over the next six decades, roughly twelve million people passed through it. Every one of them was inspected.

What inspection meant

It helps to picture the line, and I will label this a reconstruction from the historical record, not a quotation from any one person's memory. A new arrival, having left the ship with a numbered tag matching a line on the manifest, entered the great registry hall and waited. Inspectors watched people climb the stairs, looking for signs of illness or infirmity. Government doctors examined eyes, scalp and general health. A disease such as trachoma, a contagious eye infection, was grounds for refusal. After the medical check came the legal inspection: an inspector, often with an interpreter, put to the immigrant a set of questions drawn from the manifest and the statute. Where do you come from? Who paid for your passage? Do you have a job waiting? Do you have money? Where are you going and who will meet you?

The point of all this was the line in the law. The exclusion categories were real, and people were excluded under them. The commonly cited figure is that only a small minority, about two percent, were turned away at Ellis Island. Two percent sounds small, and on one level it is. But applied to twelve million people it is hundreds of thousands of individual families sent back across the ocean. And the low rate partly reflects the effect of screening at the origin, since steamship lines did not want to pay for a refused passenger's return voyage, and many would-be travelers who knew they would fail the medical exam never bought a ticket at all.

So when your great-grandmother stepped up to the inspector's desk, she was not strolling into a void. She was passing a test. That is the part of the family story that the family story leaves out.

The rules kept tightening

The second misreading in the argument is to treat the whole era as one thing. It was not. The law changed over time, and the direction of change is instructive.

• 1882: The first general federal exclusion act, and, in the same year, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first major federal law to bar a group on the basis of nationality. It was a grave injustice, and I will not pretend otherwise. We have a longer post on The Chinese Exclusion Case and How the Court Found a Sovereign Power to Exclude.
• 1885: The contract labor law, which barred the importation of workers under contract before they arrived, reflecting the era's labor politics.
• 1891: The federal inspection system described above.
• 1903 and 1907: Additional excluded classes, including anarchists, and a larger head tax.
• 1917: A literacy requirement, passed over a presidential veto, requiring immigrants over a certain age to read in some language.
• 1921 and 1924: The quota laws. The Immigration Act of 1924 required an immigrant to obtain an immigration visa from an American consul abroad before sailing.

That last item is the one the family story cannot get around. The visa requirement the argument says did not exist arrived in 1924, and the reason is worth understanding. By the early twentieth century the volume of arrivals had grown so large that inspection at the dock, with a ship already in the harbor and passengers already across an ocean, was a cruel and inefficient way to decide who could enter. It is a kind of cruelty to make a family cross the Atlantic and then send them home from a pier. Moving the decision to the consulate, before the voyage, was meant to be an improvement. A person who was going to be refused found out in his own country rather than in New York Harbor.

If your great-grandparents arrived in the 1890s, they came when the standards were the 1891 act's. If they came in 1910, they came under the standards of 1907 and 1903. If they came after 1924, they needed a visa. "Papers" is a question of which decade.

The answer, in numbered points

Here is the answer, in order.

1. They had papers. A passenger manifest was required by federal law from 1819 onward, and Ellis Island matched each arrival to a line on it. A manifest, a medical card and an inspector's decision are documents. The family story says "no papers" when it means "no visa," and the visa was a later invention for a reason.
2. They were inspected, and some were refused. The exclusion categories were written into statute: public charge, contagious disease, criminal conviction, contract labor, polygamy, and later more. Hundreds of thousands were turned back. Ellis Island was an inspection station, and an inspection station has to be able to say no.
3. The numbers were different. Today's debate is about people who enter without any inspection at all, or who stay after a visa expires. That is the thing Ellis Island did not allow. Its whole design was to ensure that nobody stepped onto the mainland without passing through the registry room. The ancestor who was inspected is the legal immigrant of his day, and the modern argument is mostly about someone else.
4. The system was open, and it still had a rule. A conservative can say, with no embarrassment, that the late nineteenth century had large-scale immigration and enforced standards at the same time. The two went together. The standards were part of why a society that took in millions could absorb them. We make the case at greater length in Self-Sufficiency Was the First Immigration Rule, the Public Charge Story.
5. A welfare state changes the arithmetic. The Ellis Island era had no federal safety net of the modern kind, which is why "likely to become a public charge" was the exclusion ground that did the most work. A country with a large benefits system has stronger reasons, not weaker ones, to set its terms in advance.

I should say what this argument does not claim. It does not claim the old system was just. The Chinese Exclusion Act was a disgrace, the national-origins quotas of the 1920s were designed in part to reduce arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, and the conservative defense of the rule of law is perfectly compatible with the judgment that some of those rules were wrong. A conservative can honor the process and criticize particular laws. Both are the work of citizens who take law seriously.

What the story really honors

Now let me give the family story its due, because I would not want you to leave this post thinking your grandmother was a villain in her own memoir.

The impulse behind the story is gratitude, and gratitude is a conservative virtue. It says: somebody opened a door for us, and we should remember what it cost. What I'm asking is that we remember what the door was. It was a door with a doorkeeper. People of that era understood, as a matter of course, that a nation decides who comes in, that a medical examiner could say no, that a young man with no skills and no sponsor might be sent home. They accepted that, as most people did, because they had grown up in a world of papers, passports, military drafts and permits. They went through the process because it was the process.

That is the sense in which honoring your ancestors means honoring the rule of law under which they lived. Picture an Italian grandfather, a hypothetical, who stood in the registry hall, sweating through a coat he had worn for three weeks, hoping the inspector would chalk no letter on his shoulder, was not a man who believed there should be no inspection. He was a man who passed one. His descendants honor him best by remembering that the line was real, that he stood in it, and that the people in line behind him deserve a fair one too.

There is another thing the story does, quietly, which is to turn an argument about law into an argument about family. Notice how it works. If you object to the argument, you are attacking somebody's great-grandmother. No one wants to do that, so the objection has to be swallowed. I would suggest that is a poor way to make policy. The right way to honor a great-grandmother is to ask what she did. She obeyed the rules of her day, took a medical exam, answered an inspector's questions and then went to work. That is not an argument for ignoring the rules.

The Founding connection

The Constitution leaves the question of who comes in to the national legislature. Article I, Section 8 says that Congress shall have the power "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization," and the early statutes, as One Uniform Rule, How the First Congresses Wrote America's Naturalization Laws describes, set residency periods, good-character requirements and an oath. The Founders were not hostile to newcomers, and the very first naturalization act in 1790 welcomed free white persons of good character after two years of residence, a restriction by race that we rightly reject today. But they treated membership as something a self-governing people defines through law. The Ellis Island system was the nineteenth-century expression of that principle, with the technology of its day.

Fix that picture in your mind the next time someone tells the story at dinner. The immigrants came by the millions. The country welcomed them. And the government stood at the dock with a clipboard, as it had every right to do.

The case in brief

1. The claim that great-grandparents "came without papers" confuses a visa requirement, which arrived in 1924, with the absence of any documents or inspection.
2. Federal law required a passenger manifest from 1819, the Immigration Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1891 set exclusion grounds and federal inspection, and Ellis Island, opened January 1, 1892, inspected roughly twelve million people.
3. People were refused, and the shipping lines paid to carry them back, which pushed screening to the point of departure.
4. The rules kept tightening, from contract labor in 1885 to literacy in 1917 to the consular visa in 1924, so "papers" depends on the decade.
5. Honoring ancestors means honoring the lawful process they went through, and it does not require us to pretend that the process did not exist.

What you can do: look up your family's arrival on a passenger manifest through the National Archives, read the questions the inspectors were required to ask, and share them at your next family dinner.