Isabel Belarsky was one of the millions of people who were processed on Ellis Island before its immigration facility closed in 1954. In 2014, she told the BBC about reaching the gateway to the US from the Soviet Union in 1930.

On 12 November 1954, a Norwegian seaman Arne Petterson was questioned by immigration officials after overstaying his US shore leave. He risked being deported, but instead he was granted parole, and as he stepped on board a ferry in New York Harbor, he was snapped by a photographer. He was the last person to be processed on Ellis Island.

The same day, the island that had been millions of migrants’ first glimpse of the US closed its immigration facilities for good. By the time Petterson left, Ellis Island was mostly being used as a detention centre for illegal entrants and suspected communists, but for more than 60 years for many people it was a stepping stone to a whole new life.

Situated at the mouth of Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, the island had been selected by President Benjamin Harrison as the site of a central immigration facility in 1890 when it became clear that the one in Manhattan was unable to cope with the influx of new arrivals. In the decades before Ellis Island opened, the patterns of immigration to the US had shifted. From the 1880s there was a sudden rise in people coming from southern and eastern Europe. Many of them were trying to escape poverty, political oppression or religious persecution in their home countries. But as President John F Kennedy wrote in his 1958 book A Nation of Immigrants, “There are probably as many reasons for coming to America as there were people who came.”

In preparation, the island was enlarged, partly by using landfill hollowed out from New York’s first subway tunnels, and a new dock and three-storey timber building were constructed. This building would need to be rebuilt just five years later when a fire burnt it to the ground, destroying all passenger records dating back to 1855.

On 1 January 1892, Ellis Island opened to receive immigrants. At its peak, during the early years of the 20th Century, thousands of people passed through its gates each day. Angel Island in San Francisco Bay had the same role on the west coast from 1910 to 1940. But according to the National Park Service, some 40% of Americans living today are descended from immigrants who came through Ellis Island. Many of the people who would help shape the identity of the US in the 20th Century, from film director Frank Capra (born in Italy) and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (born in Russia) to actress Claudette Colbert (born in France) and cosmetician Max Factor (born in Poland), were processed at the island as children.

Isabel Belarsky was one such child. In 1930 she made the arduous sea voyage to the US with her family from what was then the Soviet Union. “Oh boy, that was some journey. It was cold, we had nothing to wear. Everybody was freezing. Finally, we came through Ellis Island,” she told the BBC in 2014.

The steamships on which immigrants such as the Belarskys journeyed were divided by money and class, with the majority of people being third class passengers crowded together, in often unsanitary conditions in steerage. Before a ship could enter New York Harbor, it first had to stop at a quarantine checkpoint off Staten Island. There doctors boarded the vessel looking for signs of sickness, such as smallpox and cholera. People with contagious diseases were banned from entering the US, as were polygamists, anarchists and convicted criminals, among others. The first restrictions on immigration had begun to be enacted by Congress in the 1870s. Many of these had an explicit racial prejudice, with laws that first targeted Chinese migrants and later excluded immigration from most Asian countries.

If the ship passed its health inspection, the first and second-class passengers would be interviewed and processed onboard. During Ellis Island’s first few decades, immigrants to the US did not require passports, visas or any official government paperwork at all. Passports existed, but they were only universally adopted in 1920. Instead, when passengers first boarded a ship, they gave spoken answers to questions which were recorded in its manifest. These were then checked by US officials and, provided those wealthier passengers were sickness-free and had no legal issues, they were allowed to enter the US, bypassing Ellis Island entirely.

Everyone else was tagged with the ship’s name and the page number where they appeared on the manifest. They were then put on a ferry to Ellis Island where their future would be decided. When they arrived at the island and entered the main building, women and children were separated into one line and men into the other. Then they climbed the steep winding staircase to the registry room on the second floor, carefully watched by doctors who were looking out for signs of wheezing, coughing or limping that suggested health problems.

When they reached the registry room, they faced a brief medical examination. This was a nerve-racking experience. Immigrant children were asked their names so the doctors could check that they were not deaf or dumb. Toddlers who were being carried were made to walk to prove that they could. “It was interesting but a little frightening, too, because we couldn’t speak English,” Belarsky told the BBC.

If the doctor suspected a health issue they would mark letters on that person’s clothes in chalk: H for heart problems, X for mental illness, CT for trachoma – a highly contagious and much feared eye infection that can lead to blindness. The test for this was particularly uncomfortable: doctors would turn a person’s eyelid inside out using their fingers or a buttonhook, an implement used for fastening small buttons. If a person got a chalk mark, they would be removed from the line and confined in what was called the “doctor’s pen” for a more thorough examination.

If they then failed a medical inspection they would be detained or outright refused entry and sent back to where they had travelled from. In some cases, this could mean a family being broken up. Official statistics record that only around 2% were refused entry to the US, but that still means that nearly 125,000 people, who had endured the long and difficult journey to get there, were sent home within sight of Manhattan. 

Those who passed the medical exam proceeded to a legal screening. Inspectors would check their tags and quiz them, often with the help of an interpreter, about everything from their eye colour and who paid for their passage to whether they were literate and whether they had ever been held in a mental health institution. Most people were processed quickly and went through Ellis Island within a few hours. But if a migrant’s answers didn’t match the ones on the ship’s manifest, or if the inspectors were suspicious about them for some reason, their name was marked with an X and they were detained.

Around 20% of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island ended up being temporarily detained there. This could happen for a variety of reasons. Women travelling alone or with children were often viewed as potential burdens to the state. Officials would frequently class them as Liable to Become a Public Charge (LPCs), detaining them until a male family member – because no women were allowed to leave Ellis Island with a man not related to them – could turn up and vouch for them. Unmarried women who were pregnant could be judged by inspectors as “immoral” and held. Stowaways who weren’t on the manifest, migrant labourers suspected of being brought into the US to break union strikes, and anyone officials deemed to be politically suspect could be detained or refused entry.

Although Isabel Belarsky’s father, Sidor, was a renowned opera singer who had been invited to come to the US, her family was still automatically detained at Ellis Island. This was because at the time the US did not maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Detainees would sleep in triple-tiered bunk beds in dormitory rooms on the building’s third floor, receiving three meals a day until their cases could be resolved. Sometimes this could mean an overnight stay, sometimes it could be weeks or months. “They gave us 10 minutes every so often to go outside. When we went out they counted us,” said Belarsky. “And when we came back, they counted again. When we sat down, when we ate, they also counted.”

If arrivals had been detained because they were ill, and they hadn’t been refused entry, they would be held in hospital wards on the island. While most recovered, more than 3,500 immigrants died on Ellis Island in sight of New York and their dream of a better life. Some 350 babies were also born on the island, although this was no guarantee of citizenship for the child.

Once an immigrant’s health or legal issues were successfully concluded, they were registered and free to enter the US and start their new lives. Belarsky said: “For me it was very exciting when I was a youngster. And finally, somebody got us the papers to leave Ellis Island. It was a beautiful sight. Beautiful. That was the greatest day of all our lives.” 

By the time the Belarsky family came through in 1930, the era of mass immigration to the US had already come to an end. Following World War One, the US Congress enacted sweeping laws based on race and nationality which restricted who could come into the country. The Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 were designed to cap annual immigration, imposing strict quotas that favoured people from northern and western European countries. 

As immigration decreased, Ellis Island’s role began to change. During World War Two, some 7,000 German, Italian and Japanese nationals suspected of being enemy aliens were interred there. Later, US soldiers returning from the war were treated in its hospital. In the late 1940s, as the Cold War developed, suspected communists who were swept up in the paranoia of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare were incarcerated there while the US government reviewed the often secret evidence against them. But by the 1950s, the use of air travel and modern entry procedures at airports made Ellis Island increasingly obsolete. In 1954, after 62 years of operation, it finally closed down, but it is open again today as a museum that highlights the rich history of new arrivals to the US. 

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