What happened to immigrants at Ellis Island before they could enter the US in the late 19th and early 20th century?
Immigrants who wanted to come to the U.S. through the city of New York passed through the gates of Ellis Island from 1892 to 1954. This was the busiest immigration station in the U.S. when it was open. Before people where allowed ashore in New York, they had to be processed at Ellis Island.
The process had a multitude of steps. When passengers were offloaded they were first numbed with paper tags. These number were used to cross-reference immigrants to make sure they had the right to land.
They were then sorted into long lines where they were eventually met by a team of doctors who inspected them for a number of different ailments. Children were talked to in order to see if they were deaf or dumb. If they were observed to have any sort of medical condition, they received a blue chalk mark that required them to take...
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more tests. Those suspected of having feeble minds would be submitted to a series of puzzles to gage their mental aptitude. Anyone who failed these exams would be sent right back to their ship. Families had to decide whether or not to be separated or stick together at this point.
After sorting, immigrants were registered in the Great Hall. Inspectors verified 29 different pieces of information on each immigrant and would ask many questions. These questions would range from where they were born to how they planned to support themselves in the U.S. Any answers that were deemed unsatisfactory could result in someone being asked to go back to their point f origin.
From the Great Hall they descended down a set of stairs where they could purchase train tickets and reclaim their luggage.
What happened when people arrived at Ellis Island?
The first step at the Immigration Center on Ellis Island was a medical exam, which was pretty basic and took maybe five minutes. On the staps of the Great Hall the new immigrant was examined briefly by a doctor who would check for the obvious; lameness, pregnancy, blindness, hernia, lung problems, etc. If the doctor noticed a possible problem he would make a chalk mark on the immigrant's coat, using a standardized set of abbreviations. At the top of the entryway stairs another doctor would check the eyes for trachoma, a contagious disease. Immigrants with trachoma were basically turned away from America.
This was followed by a mental exam, which consisted of figuring out basic puzzles, such as a happy face, a sad face, a steamship, etc. The immigrant also had to draw a diamond shape, and was graded on these tests by his or her level of education. The third step was the legal exam, where immigrants were asked questions such as, "Have you ever been to America before?", "Do you have a job waiting for you? and "Do you have a criminal record?" The immigrant's identification was examined to make sure of who he or she was, and the immigrant had to have twenty-five dollars, or stay on Ellis Island until he could get the money or returned home.
After 1917 there was a literacy test, in which the immigrant had to read a 40 word passage in his or her native language.