Angel Island Immigration Station

Angel Island Immigration Station, the principal immigration facility on the West Coast of the United States from 1910 to 1940. Angel Island encompasses an area of about 740 acres (300 hectares) and is located in San Francisco Bay, California, near Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge, between 1.25 miles (2 km) and 1.5 miles (2.5 km) north of San Francisco. It functioned as both an immigration and deportation facility, at which some 175,000 Chinese and about 60,000 Japanese immigrants were detained under oppressive conditions, generally from two weeks to six months, before being allowed to enter the United States.

Having served successively as a hunting and fishing ground for the Miwok people, a private cattle ranch, a military base and embarkation point, as well as a quarantine station, Angel Island replaced a congested structure on a pier in San Francisco as the West Coast’s main immigration facility in 1910. Unlike Ellis Island, where Europeans were subject to restrictions that precluded entrance for some but not most immigrants, the Angel Island Immigration Station employed discriminatory policies that were used to prevent Asians from immigrating. This approach was an outgrowth and implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which had resulted from years of racial hostility by white Americans against immigrant Chinese labourers.

Passengers arriving in San Francisco were screened aboard ship and separated by nationality. Europeans and first-class passengers were generally permitted immediate entrance to the city. Asians—along with some other immigrant groups (notably Mexicans and Russians) as well as those thought to require medical quarantine—were ferried to Angel Island. Because the Exclusion Act and its revisions limited Chinese immigration to certain skilled occupations while also allowing entrance to the children of U.S. citizens, elaborate steps were taken by Chinese immigrants to masquerade as practitioners of qualifying vocations or as the “paper sons” and “paper daughters” of Chinese Americans. The immigration authorities’ rigorous efforts to expose fraud resulted in protracted, exhaustive interrogations and related interviews of corroborating parties that sometimes kept the immigrants captive on the island for weeks or months. Boards of Special Inquiry grilled immigrants on minutiae related to their stated occupations, families, or hometowns. The immigrants were also subjected to extensive physical examinations that violated their cultural norms.

The station’s location on the island was intended to keep the detainees isolated and was thought to be escape-proof. Before long the Angel Island facility also became a deportation centre for those already in the country in violation of the Exclusion Act. The station comprised some 45 purpose-built structures, including a hospital, a laboratory, barracks, a laundry, and a two-story bathhouse. When the main administration building was destroyed by fire in 1940, the immigration facility was relocated to the mainland. In 1954 a small part of the island became a California state park, with land added to the park between then and 1963, after which point the park’s boundaries encompassed nearly the whole island.