With a rising demand for farm and industrial workers, America opened its portals to approximately 20 million immigrants between 1892 and 1924. Fourteen million of these new, mainly European arrivals entered through Ellis Island, which had replaced the aging Castle Garden facility located at the Battery on the New York City shore. In his detailed and engrossing narrative of those years, historian Ronald H. Bayor offers an eye-level account of the perilous “journey to Ellis Island.” While he mainly depicts the particulars of this early-twentieth-century moment, he still points to the eerie continuity between that time and twenty-first-century America. Bayor observes that “two ideological views shaped U.S. immigration policy and still play a role in contemporary America.” On the one hand, a positive spirit of “civic nationalism” welcomed “diversity” and promised “equality and fairness to all who came to the United States.” On the other hand, Ellis Island and especially Angel Island on the West Coast could also signify an opposing spirit of crude nativism, bigotry, and “racial nationalism.”
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