Free American Passage by Vincent J. Cannato Page B

immigration station. Congress appropriated $75,000 to improve Ellis Island for the purposes of creating a new immigrant depot. The island was a perfect choice in many ways. It was already in the possession of the federal government as an underused munitions depot. Its island location meant that the immigrant runners and other predators could be kept at a distance, but it was only a quick ferry ride to Manhattan or the railroads on the Jersey side of the harbor.
    Before the low-lying island could be made usable, a good deal of work was needed. While immigrants were being processed at the Barge Office—mostly by ex–Castle Garden inspectors—work had begun on dredging a deeper channel to Ellis Island. Docks were constructed on the island, as well as a two-story wooden building, which would be the main reception area. It would take nearly two years to complete the project. Meanwhile, the national debate over the meaning of immigration only intensified.
    “Give us a rest,” thundered Francis A. Walker. He worried that “no one can be surely enough of an optimist to contemplate without dread the fast rising flood of immigration now setting in upon our shores.” Walker was no average citizen. He was the nation’s most esteemed economist, a late-nineteenth-century combination of Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith.
    A well-bred Bostonian descended from generations of Anglo-Saxon stock, Walker possessed an envious résumé that mirrored the great transformations of nineteenth-century America. A Union general in the Civil War by his midtwenties, Walker was in charge of the 1870 and 1880 Censuses and then taught economics at Yale. At the time of his musings on immigration, Walker was president of both MIT and the American Economic Association.
    Walker found the new immigrants “ignorant, unskilled, inert, accustomed to the beastliest conditions with little of social aspiration, with none of the expensive tastes for light and air and room, for decent dress and homely comforts.” They were lowering the country’s wages and standard of living.
    Walker also saw the birth rates of native-born Americans shrinking, while immigrant families produced more and more children. While most social scientists now see birth rates as a function of class, with birth rates shrinking as incomes rise, Walker had a different explanation: Immigrants brought down the nation’s standard of living, and native-born Americans revolted against this situation by refusing to bring more children into such a degraded world. Walker’s thesis neglected the fact that native-born American birth rates had been declining since the early nineteenth century, with seemingly little correlation to immigration rates.
    Walker’s views were echoed by a younger man with an even more distinguished pedigree. Forty-one-year-old Henry Cabot Lodge had already established himself in academia, gaining the first PhD in political science from Harvard. Though he would continue to write, especially about the glory of Anglo-Saxon culture, it was politics, not academia, that beckoned. In the 1890s, first as a congressman and then as a senator, Lodge began sounding the alarm about immigration. He hoped to prove that current immigration showed “a marked tendency to deteriorate in character.”
    Lodge used the occasion of the March 1891 lynching of eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans to argue that changes were needed in the nation’s immigration law. The cause of the attack was not antiimmigrant sentiment, Lodge argued, but rather “the utter carelessness with which we treat immigration to this country.” For Lodge, the lynchings were one more piece of evidence showing that America could no longer “permit this stream to pour in without discrimination or selection or the exclusion of dangerous and undesirable elements.” He called for moderate restriction that did not “exclude a desirable immigrant who seeks in good faith to become a citizen of the United