Confronting Anti-Ellis Island Immigration A contrast to open door catastrophes. by Victor Davis Hanson
Between 1892 and 1954, approximately 12 million immigrants arrived at the now-iconic Ellis Island to enter the U. S. or nearly 200, 000 legal entries per year. All were registered, documented, and given rudimentary health exams. They arrived as rich and poor, white and non-white, and, without exception, legally. With the gradual decline of such great influxes, Ellis Island finally ceased operating roughly 71 years ago. Yet Ellis Island’s successful tenure offers a sharp contrast to the failures of our recent open-border catastrophes. Americans will never know how many immigrants swarmed the southern border between 2021 and 2025, when former President Joe Biden and his impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas destroyed federal immigration law as we once knew it. By design, they allowed between 10 and 12 million foreign nationals to make a mockery of federal immigration laws by swarming the southern border. Many crossers grew violent at any sign of even meek efforts by ICE officers to enforce the law. Border Patrol officers were often mocked, threatened, and assaulted by arriving illegal aliens. Officers were unsure as to what was worse: the occasional violence from illegal immigrants or retaliation from the Biden administration if they sought to enforce federal law and block illegal entrants. So the Biden administration pulled off the near impossible. In a mere four years, it had invited in almost as many illegal immigrants as had entered through Ellis Island legally over seven decades. But unlike past immigrants, we now witness organized violence against ICE officials. We see Orwellian scenes of mobs burning the American flag the flag of the country they demand to stay in while waving the flags of the countries they have no desire or intention of returning to. In sum, three generations ago, a smaller, poorer, but wiser America properly solved its immigration problem at Ellis Island welcoming in immigrants orderly and legally with health and background screenings.