Angel Island: Immigration Station Regulation

• In Event: Asia and Asian American Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2: Asia and Asian American Section Roundtables Session - Law and Governance

Abstract

This study examines the role that Angel Island played in the detainment and health inspections of Asian immigrants. Scholars on immigration have paid great attention to Ellis Island as an immigration station on the Atlantic, but Angel Island was the immigration station in the Pacific. Though both served as processing centers for immigrants before they entered the United States, the two islands differed significantly in how they received and treated the immigrants who passed through. Ellis Island is often hailed as a beacon of hope and the start of a new life, while Angel Island is its antithesis. Ellis Island provided a faster process, while Angel Island was slower and posed more hurdles. This study uses oral histories from Angel Island (n=62) to understand how immigrants were processed by health and immigration officials and juxtaposes those experiences with the literature on Ellis Island. One would think that immigration stations, wherever they were, would treat immigrants the same, but that was not the case. This raises the question of how Chinese immigrants are treated differently during processing. Preliminary findings show that Chinese immigrants faced longer detentions and more intense investigations by inspectors, partly due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The experiences were intersectional; specifically, Chinese men had a harder time compared to Chinese women.

Author

• Chassidy Wen, University of Washington