Ellis Island's Jersey Shore, Immigration and the Garden State Gateway

A ferry or barge carried steerage passengers from Lower Manhattan across the harbor to the small island in the upper harbor. First-class and second-class passengers typically bypassed Ellis Island altogether, cleared aboard ship. It was the people in steerage who were brought to Ellis Island, and it was New Jersey that had legal jurisdiction over the water and the mudflats where Ellis Island stood.

This jurisdictional fact, contested by New York for decades and finally resolved by the Supreme Court in nineteen ninety-eight, which awarded New Jersey the greater portion of the island, matters because it anchors something larger. Between eighteen ninety-two, when the main immigration station opened, and nineteen fifty-four, when it closed, approximately twelve million people passed through Ellis Island. About forty percent of all Americans alive today can trace at least one ancestor through that processing hall.

Those ancestors came from everywhere: southern Italy and Sicily in the largest numbers, then Poland, Russia, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Greece, Syria, and dozens of other nations. They arrived speaking hundreds of languages, carrying everything they owned, and they funneled into New Jersey as much as anywhere, into the factories of Newark and Paterson and Camden, into the truck farms of Hunterdon and Gloucester counties, into the rooming houses of Hoboken and Bayonne. New Jersey absorbed them and was changed by them utterly.

Today the state is among the most ethnically diverse in the country, with large communities tracing roots to Portugal, India, the Philippines, Korea, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and many other nations who did not arrive through Ellis Island but arrived through a harbor that Ellis Island taught the country how to manage. The faces in a New Jersey diner or classroom are a direct consequence of that crossing, a century or more ago.