Gateway to the land of plenty

• Last Updated: November 06. 2009 1:51PM UAE / November 6. 2009 9:51AM GMT

For more than 60 years, Ellis Island received people from the Old World crossing over to the New. Now, 55 years after the centre in New York Harbour closed its doors, Alasdair Soussi traces the paths of Arab immigrants who came to the United States seeking a better life.



Iconic monuments don’t come much bigger than Ellis Island. Lying in New York Harbour at the mouth of the Hudson River, the island was America’s beating heart for more than 60 years: an institution that welcomed many millions of immigrants from faraway lands, all hoping for a better life in the land of opportunity. Most who passed through it came looking for a nation that promised all the trappings of wealth, equality and liberty. Some found it, others did not, but all who stepped on to its hallowed ground became part of an amazing legacy.

Today, 55 years after it closed its doors to immigrants, on November 12, 1954, Ellis Island is a thriving tourist attraction, its redbrick facade enclosing a museum dedicated to those once-weary travellers who now form much of America’s immigrant past.

The tourist-friendly ferry ride to Liberty Island, home to the French-bequeathed Statue of Liberty, and across to Ellis Island, a round trip costing just $12 (Dh44), may now be commonplace, but for those who came from foreign shores from the late 19th century onwards, the sight of these two imposing structures signalled a rebirth, a leap of faith to a new, better life.

From 1892, more than 12 million immigrants packed the halls of Ellis Island on their way to the United States’ mainland. Waves of southern and eastern Europeans joined others from Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland, each bringing their own culture and language, each with their own story to tell. But among the throng of European travellers, and, most notably, during the centre’s peak immigration years from 1892 to 1924, were Arab immigrants, mostly Christians, from the Ottoman Empire, tens of thousands of whom followed that familiar route across the Atlantic to the New World to seek their fortune. Most hailed from the Greater Syria region of the Middle East, which covered what is today Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the occupied West Bank, and formed much of the recorded 212,825 immigrants who, from 1892 to 1897 and 1901 to 1931, entered Ellis Island from lands under Ottoman rule until 1920. Ellis Island may have welcomed Arabs predominantly of a Christian persuasion, but Muslims from the Middle East and north Africa were not uncommon sights at America’s premier immigration centre. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Iran and Iraq provided a small, steady stream of Ellis Island newcomers. One such Muslim immigrant was Hussein Shousher, a 14-year-old boy from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Shousher, travelling alone, landed on Ellis Island in 1902 and was soon exposed to the rough and tumble of immigrant life.

“The details are vague, but he did have a period of time where he was on Ellis Island and was actually quarantined on the island for about three months because, I think, of an eye infection,” says 61-year-old Jamelie Hassan, Shousher’s granddaughter, a writer and artist based in Ontario, Canada. “He left the Bekaa Valley when it was still under the Ottoman Empire and it was quite typical for young men to leave the villages in this period because they didn’t want to serve in the Turkish army; there was a draft which obligated them to do so. Once he left the island there were communities there that had members that he connected with and from there he headed up to Canada. His intention was to connect with someone who was working up in Montreal, from where he planned to meet up with relatives of his mother’s who were living in Ontario.”

Shousher, like many immigrants at the time, embraced his new life with gusto and changed his name. In a move to fit in with North American society, Hussein Shousher became Sam Hallick (taking Sam from Hussein and Hallick from the real and more pronounceable name of his mother’s family in Canada). After a spell in Canada, Hallick ventured south into the US again, where, after working on the railroads, he settled in South Dakota, opening an ice-cream parlour called the Snowball Cafe. Hallick married twice in the US. His first marriage ended after his wife, Jessie whose family had immigrated from Scotland, died of tuberculosis.

His second wife, Ayshi, a young Arab-American woman whose family also originated from Lebanon, died also. Disillusioned, Hallick returned to Lebanon with his only son in 1921. There he lived out the remaining years of his life with his third wife, Fatima, with whom he had five children, before succumbing to TB and dying in 1934 at the age of 46.

Many of the Christian Arabs who came to the United States during this period did so because of the American missionary movement, says Barry Moreno, a historian at the Bob Hope Memorial Library at Ellis Island. “Going back to the 1840s, the Presbyterian church sent missionaries to the Middle East, as well as to Turkey and the Balkans. The Turkish government refused to let them proselytise Muslims, but told them that they could proselytise Christians. And the historic Christians of the Ottoman Empire were Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks and, of course, Arab Maronites and Egyptian Copts. So, it’s the American missionaries that are the ones that introduce to these neighbourhoods the idea of coming to the United States. But Arab Christians also had troubles, at times, with the Turks. I won’t go so far as to say persecution, but there were some episodes of difficulty.”

Ellis Island opened on January 1, 1892. The centre, which was originally built of Georgia pine before a fire in 1897 forced builders to reconstruct it using steel and redbrick, was not the first institution of its kind in New York. From 1855 to 1890, Castle Garden, located on the Battery in lower Manhattan, processed more than eight million immigrants and was America’s primary immigration centre (other processing ports were in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Baltimore). But national uproar over the seemingly casual nature of the immigration process meant Castle Garden, created largely to protect and help fresh arrivals, gave way to Ellis Island, whose raison d’être was to make sure only the fittest and ablest entered the US.

And so at Ellis Island, just like the waves of Italians, Poles and others, Arab immigrants were inspected to assess their physical and mental health. Arriving in ships such as the Nevada and the Victoria, passengers travelling in the cheapest and most popular steerage class would head directly for Ellis Island, leaving the more prosperous arrivals in the cabin class to head directly to shore – US citizen or not – though more stringent checks for cabin passengers would be adopted in later years. Once inside, arrivals would ascend a double staircase under the watchful gaze of medical inspectors who would look for signs of infirmity.

A physical defect or disease, such as the contagious eye condition trachoma, usually resulted in deportation, as would those considered “idiots”, “morons”, “imbeciles” or “feebleminded”. Mental tests became all the rage at Ellis Island, and the racial stereotyping that pervaded such disciplines at the time led the American sociologist, Edward A Ross, to label Jews small, weak and “exceedingly sensitive to pain”, Slavs as “immune to certain kinds of dirt” and Mediterranean types as skilled at “nimble lying”.

If immigrants passed through Ellis Island without a hitch – only two per cent were denied entry, even if such decisions often led to heartbreaking family separations – America lay before them in all its rich splendour, though many were to find that America’s streets were not quite paved with gold. For some Arab immigrants, New York, a bustling, if predominantly, poor city where the wealth resided with the few, became their place of residence, with many settling in Little Syria on the lower west side of Manhattan – neighbouring large pockets of Armenians, Greeks and Irish – and in Brooklyn. Others travelled to Boston, the home of the late Lebanese-American poet and philosopher Khalil Gibran (also an Ellis Island immigrant), and West Virginia, forming strong Arab communities.

“Many of the Arabs left New York, because, like Greeks, many were in the peddling trade,” says Moreno, the author of the Encyclopaedia Of Ellis Island. “But the base of the operations was in Little Syria where the World Trade Center used to stand. Most of the Arabs there were what we would call Lebanese or ‘Syrian’ Christians, and they spoke Arabic, had Arabic-language newspapers, churches, shops and also warehouses where some entrepreneurs stored goods imported from the Middle East to New York, which were then distributed by pedlars across the United States.”

But not all Arabs became pedlars. Some, such as George Ajjan’s descendants, were drawn to the gates of Ellis Island by a very different profession.

Ajjan, a resident of New Jersey, and one of about 3.5 million Arab-Americans, can trace his family line back to early 20th century Syria when all sides of his Christian-Arab family left Aleppo to try their luck in the most dynamic country on earth.

“They were all drawn to the United States because of the silk industry,” says 33-year-old Ajjan, a prominent US political analyst and entrepreneur.

“Aleppo was a major silk producer. They ended up in Paterson, New Jersey, which was known as Silk City, so that was basically what drew them. For many Arabs at that time, the idea was to go to the land of opportunity, strike it rich, and after five or 10 years, to come back and live the life of an aristocrat. But I think assimilating and leaving behind that life just became a reality that was insurmountable.”

Indeed, the professions that immigrants adopted in America provide more than just interesting asides, according to Moreno. They reveal intriguing trends, which seem to vary across the myriad cultures, identities and nationalities.

“Among Italians, they would go into construction work, hard labour, like the Irish. You won’t see this with the Arabs – they would go into first peddling and then small shopkeeping. They went into a certain line of business, very similar to the Greeks. They would open these little shops – grocers and even restaurants – though that wasn’t too widespread because there wasn’t much interest in Arab food at this time.”

For most newly arrived Arab immigrants, life in the US was a struggle, not least because of language barriers, which proved difficult to overcome in a land where, in spite of a sizeable Arabic-speaking community, they were immigrant minorities.

“Arabs had huge language differences compared with others,” adds Moreno. “Arabic is a Semitic language and is completely unrelated to Indo-European languages. It’s a family all its own. Unlike Jews, who spoke Yiddish, which is a dialect of German, Arabs didn’t even have that connection. So they were people who really had to learn to speak English. They couldn’t get around it. Their community was large, but not big enough to ignore the dominant English. They weren’t like the Italians who were big enough to ignore the English at times because there were so many Italians. But that wasn’t so with Arabs if they wanted to succeed.”

Though most immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were admitted, many of those who were not – on the grounds of disease or the grandly titled Moral Turpitude – used their initiative to great effect, as Ajjan explains.

“We have relatives who we still keep in touch with in Mexico on my father’s mother’s side. When they arrived in New York, they failed an inspection on Ellis Island for trachoma, and instead of going back on a boat to their home country, they chose to go on a boat that took them down to Mexico. Many of the Arab immigrants who ended up scattered around Latin America, whether Argentina, Brazil or Mexico, for instance, were initially intending to head to the United States but ended up in Latin America because they failed the health requirements.”

Attitudes to immigration in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a mix of racial prejudice and a desire to encourage the best and brightest to share and aid in economic growth.

Many native-born Anglo-Saxons believed themselves of superior stock and, subscribing to scientific theories that supposedly proved mental inferiority, feared southern and eastern Europeans would taint America’s established north/west European gene pool. But, despite being fewer in number than their European counterparts, Arabs, too, found themselves categorised as such.

Dr Louise Cainkar, a sociologist and assistant professor in the department of social and cultural sciences at Marquette University, Wisconsin, says: “The majority of immigrants at that time were from southern and eastern Europe and they were seen as inferior whites. There was a whole scientific racism at that time, and Arabs were clustered into that group. What that meant was that they were accorded the kind of rights and privileges of whiteness and, in terms of assimilation, outcomes would be good. On the other hand they were discriminated against by mainstream whites. But, by the second generation, many were middle class and quite successful.”

The passage of the Immigrant Quota Act in 1921 signalled the decline of Ellis Island as a major point of entry for immigrants, and with the advent of the National Origins Act of 1924, mass immigration into the US stopped. Though Ellis Island continued to receive immigrants, the numbers were comparatively few. Immigrants now applied for visas at American consulates in their native countries, where they also had medical inspections. Ellis Island reverted to a centre whose main function was the detention and deportation of people who had entered the US illegally.

With the repeal of the National Origins Act in 1965, a second wave of Arab immigration occurred. Most of these newcomers were Muslim, many from the professional classes. However, while Arab-Americans of today have largely prospered economically, they have in recent years been at the forefront of racial tensions that have dominated much of America’s political discourse.

It would be wrong to ignore the deliberate attempts to smear, and racially categorise, certain immigrants, as typified by an 1896 edition of the US magazine Our Day, which featured a cartoon of Uncle Sam holding his nose as a small, pathetic immigrant arrived at the gates of America. Still, US immigration policy led Ellis Island to process about 80 per cent of its immigrants within a few hours, and about 40 per cent of Americans today can trace their ancestry to those who arrived at the centre.

“At the time when Ellis Island was active, there wasn’t this [political] stigma against Arabs as there is today,” says Ajjan, whose grandfathers fought for America in the Second World War while maintaining their Arab heritage. “Back then they were just another garlic-eating ethnic group that was viewed as something foreign to white Anglo-Saxon America, whereas today, there’s a whole bunch of political overtones that are associated with immigration.”

As Cainkar, who wrote Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American And Muslim American Experience After 9/11, explains: “You have the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and all the US media around that, which is very hostile to Arabs. And the US media, since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, has caricatured Arabs as barbaric and have, in my view, racialised them. Even though it wasn’t about Arab-Americans – it was about Arabs in the Middle East – when you keep pitching your foreign policy and the news keeps covering events and describing Arabs as barbarians and terrorists and women beaters, and this is steady fare for 30 years in this country, of course people who live next to an Arab are going to start thinking differently about them.”