Angel Island

The Good

After being used as a military reserve for the Union during the Civil War, Angel Island, an island in the San Francisco Bay, was given 20 acres of land to be turned into an immigration station in 1905 after it was decided that the previous San Francisco holding facilities for Asian immigrants were unsanitary and inadequate. In hopes of an improvement in the immigration process, Angel Island was given an administrative building, hospital, powerhouse, wharf, and enclosed detention center.

Opening on January 21, 1910, Angel Island quickly earned the name, “Ellis Island of the West,” processing up to 1 million Asian immigrants, including 250,000 Chinese immigrants and 150,000 Japanese immigrants, and those of other races as well.

Even though Angel Island was intended to be an improvement from past immigration stations for Asian immigrants, it wasn’t. It was designed without the best interests of the immigrants at heart – the location was chosen because the government deemed isolation from the mainland as the best way to control the entry of immigrants and prevent the newly arriving immigrants from communication with already settled immigrants. Families were pulled apart, separated by gender during processing, although children under 12 years old were allowed to remain with their mothers during the quarantine phase of their processing. After a full medical examination, if any disease/infection was detected, they were turned away, blocked from entering the USA. Since Angel Island was for immigrants who required further examination due to “questionable” documentation, those that passed the medical examination were then subjected to interrogation hearings and interrogations by two inspectors, with a stenographer and translator also present, hoping to trip up the immigrants and “catch them in a lie” so they could deport the immigrants back to Asia by asking about the minute details of their lives such as “who lived in the third house of the second row of [their] village.” Not only were these hearings stress-inducing and difficult, but they could last days, months, or even many years. In the meantime, the immigrants were sequestered in the detention center at the island.

The Bad and The Ugly

Being isolated from their loved ones, waiting out especially long hearings was already torture enough without taking into account the conditions of the detention center. It was a prison-like environment with secluded, closed dorms and locked doors. Furthermore, they weren’t allowed to leave the dorms without supervision from an immigration official and weren’t allowed to send or receive letters and packages without intense inspection. To pass the time, men often read books or listened to records in their native languages while women often knitted or sewed. Encapsulating the Chinese immigrants’ frustration, resentment, and unhappiness in the detention centers, poems in their native scripts were inscribed on the walls with the hard ends of ink brushes as soon as 10 months after immigrants began being housed in the men’s detention barracks.

Asian immigrants gathering on Angel Island: