Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America

From 1910 to 1940, the immigration station on Angel Island (located in the San Francisco Bay) served as the processing and detention center for over one million people from eighty different countries around the world. Two-thirds of the newcomers came from China and Japan, but there were also immigrants from India, the Philippines, Korea, Russia, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Central and South America, Australia, and New Zealand. 

Until recently, the vast majority of what we have known about Angel Island's immigration history has centered almost exclusively on the Chinese immigrant experience. New archival and community-based research relating to other immigrant groups passing through Angel Island, however, has revealed a much richer and complex history that calls into question not only how we understand Angel Island, but the entire American immigrant experience itself.

This paper will examine the great diversity of immigrants coming through Angel Island to better understand how the immigration station was used as a processing center into and out of the United States. It will first analyze how U.S. immigration policies, which treated individuals differently according to their race, class, and gender, informed how the inspection, medical examination, and detention processes on Angel Island varied – sometimes dramatically – across groups. The paper will also explore how Angel Island was not only a gateway into the United States, but also a gateway out of the United States. The work of guarding the Pacific gate required Angel Island immigration officials to investigate, arrest, and deport immigrants already in the United States due to alleged danger to the United States. Illegal immigrants, anarchists, criminals, prostitutes, German alien enemies, and others targeted for removal by the U.S. government all passed through Angel Island on their way out of the country.