Detention and Deportation
For those who were unfortunate enough to raise the suspicions of the examination staff, an arduous path lay ahead. The initial detention area contained a wide variety of people. Some people’s stories didn’t line up with facts about their voyage; others showed signs of contagious diseases; still others had failed to appear sufficiently healthy, either from stress, confusion, or exhaustion. Some genuinely suffered from some sort of psychiatric ailment and may have been seeking treatment in the US. Detentions could last a long time, depending on the volume of traffic through Ellis Island on a given day. Many stayed overnight in crowded sleeping conditions before an initial examination.
The next round of examinations tried to uncover more about immigrants’ personal lives and mental state. A physical examination was first conducted to identify any visible signs of disease. Psychiatrists would then ask questions that they thought could ascertain mental capacity. These questions took a variety of forms, including mathematical questions (ex. “What is 15+17?”), questions about discriminative ability (ex. “give three physical differences between a horse and an ox”), and questions about their journey to America (ex. “what force drives the ship?”) (1). Other questions betrayed the Christian worldview of the examiners, such as questions asking for the “number of the commandments of God” or “significance of Easter”, which were intended to serve as introductory questions during the first round of questioning.
Some examinations used a jigsaw puzzle devised by assistant surgeon Howard Knox, a precursor to IQ tests (2). Many were discharged at this stage and allowed to enter the country, the inspectors finding that they did not pose a risk of becoming “public charges” upon further investigation.
Most people at this stage were detained on Ellis Island for multiple days, either to administer treatment for curable illnesses or because of battles with advocacy organizations, interventions from relatives, or an inability to identify a place of return. A special board would be convened at this point to pass a final judgment on the detainee. This board, composed of law enforcement officers and advised by psychiatrists and other medical staff, would either let them enter the country or determine that the detainee was “liable to become a public charge” or inadmissible on various legal grounds (such as being an anarchist), providing them with a “certificate of insanity” and ordering them to be deported.
Deportation was a deeply heart-wrenching process. For many, they had left everything behind to pay for the voyage to America, betting on success in a new country. Now deported, they faced the stigma of having been rejected when they arrived home. Furthermore, there were no provisions made to ensure that deportees actually returned to their place of origin. Steamship companies were under no obligation to transport immigrants back across Europe once they were already on the other side of the Atlantic. Many deportees ended up in Atlantic ports in France, England, Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere, without the resources to return home.
Fortunately for most, deportations constituted a minority of immigration outcomes. In 1904, out of 812,870 people who arrived in the US, only 8773 were either debarred or deported (3). Immigration legislation and border enforcement were relatively new responsibilities of the federal government. The federal government invested most of its energy in uniformly excluding East Asians (especially Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans) and South Asians from entering the country and becoming citizens. During Salmon’s time, South Asians could naturalize, although the Supreme Court retroactively revoked the citizenship of all South Asians after United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923).