Third Book Discussion (October 1, 2010)

Some of the responses to the question “What was the most surprising, interesting or disturbing fact you learned from the book?” were Theodore Roosevelt’s role in immigration policy immigration laws and the mentality behind them, particularly those that discriminated against certain groups the role of the steamship companies, how they recruited immigrants that the percentage of people excluded was very low and never varied much the tremendous amount of research in the book, including details of the people involved and the cases of immigrants the people in charge of immigration and their attitudes the stereotyping of immigrants the numbers of immigrants needed to fill jobs in America at that time the discussion of the current climate in the U.S. regarding immigration and the suggestion by some that we create “a new Ellis Island” that immigrants had no papers or documents Ellis Island was used as a prison the terrorist attack on Black Tom Island in WWI many of the questions Cannato raises are those we are still dealing with class distinctions – only the steerage passengers were examined We discussed the categories of exclusion and the intelligence tests, in which persecuted people and farmers were expected to pass literacy and intelligence tests such as the Binet test. One comment was that these tests were adopted out of a fear of “polluting the gene pool, a fear that still exists today.” We talked about Roosevelt, who created the civil service system and then went around it to appoint his cronies. The civil service system was needed to provide some stability in government agencies. In a discussion of the historical significance of Ellis Island, we talked about how there are so many ways of looking at Ellis Island. It’s a story of inclusion and exclusion. It’s a symbol of diversity and a story of leveling. It makes us aware of how so many people would do anything to come here. In America, a person could start out as a worker and end up being a boss, which is not possible in many countries. It’s a symbol of how people could overcome indignity. One person commented that “Ellis Island is about the fabric of history and how we became Americans. It’s not us and them; it’s when we became us.”