Review: Anna Pegler-Gordon, Closing the Golden Door: Asian Migration and the Hidden History of Exclusion at Ellis Island

Reviewed by Maria Paz G. Esguerra

Closing the Golden Door: Asian Migration and the Hidden History of Exclusion at Ellis Island
By Anna Pegler-Gordon
University of North Carolina Press, 2021
344 pages

Anna Pegler-Gordon’s Closing the Golden Door: Asian Migration and the Hidden History of Exclusion at Ellis Island offers a glimpse into the very interesting career of Ellis Island and traces its evolution from an immigration station into a detention and deportation center. This evolution unfolds in multiple chapters that focus on the relatively small number, but diverse group of Asian immigrants and nonimmigrants who have often and long been overlooked by scholars of migration: stowaways, smugglers, and sailors, Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans detained during World War II, and Chinese accused of pro-Communist activities in the Cold War. Pegler-Gordon draws from immigration station records, newspapers, government documents, letters, and oral histories to weave these narratives together and to examine the experiences of Asian migrants at Ellis Island. While the history of Asian migrants at Ellis Island is not well known, Pegler-Gordon’s work reveals a long and rich history of Asian immigration and exclusion. The book calls for a rigorous rethinking of Asian immigration, detention, and exclusion in New York during the first half of the 20th century.

Closing the Golden Door opens with the story of sailors from Goa, a Portuguese colony on the western coast of India. Detained at Ellis Island in 1919, the Goan sailors represented a unique group that was a part of immigrants who entered and exited the United States through the island when it first opened in 1892 and when it closed in 1954. While their detention at the island was unprecedented, it was not uncommon for Asian migrants to be held for inspection and interrogation as immigration and exclusion laws required. Pegler-Gordon’s attention to the Goan sailors and their detention, its symbolism and what it represents, is at the core of the book’s argument — that Ellis Island is as much a story about Asian immigration as it is about exclusion. As such Closing the Golden Door challenges the Ellis Island model of immigration that is at the center of narratives on US immigration. Instead of celebrating it as a “golden door” into the United States, Pegler-Gordon shows how the experiences of Asians at Ellis Island “do not fit with - and in fact, challenge - historical models of both migration and exclusion.”

Exclusion and expulsion laws implemented at Ellis Island “reshaped the immigration station into a deportation and detention center, turning the golden door into a revolving door.” To help tell this story, Pegler-Gordon offers a brief history of a growing Asian New York that became larger and more established in the 1920s. Several factors contributed to this growth in the community: a demand for cheap labor, direct immigration to the city from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of Canada, as well as an increasing anti-Asian sentiment in the American West that encouraged migration east to states like New York.

The development of this community was an interesting paradox, however. New York City’s growth into the largest Chinese community on the East Coast paralleled the expansion of deportation laws and practices targeting the very same community. 1920s New York saw an aggressive anti-Chinese campaign that pushed for more restrictive exclusion and deportation practices. For example, frequent raids on New York Chinatown illustrate how immigration officials were “not only engaged in regulating the legal migration of Chinese and other Asians under exclusion but also extensively involved in the investigation, detention, and deportation of Asian New Yorkers.” Detention and deportation had multiple purposes. According to Pegler-Gordon, these included, but were not limited to, the regulation of and the population control of the Chinese community and the stringent enforcement of federal exclusion laws. In addition, the Chinese could be deported for a myriad of reasons under either immigration or exclusion policies, which reflected broader trends across the country.

Yet, despite aggressive efforts at the detention and removal of Chinese New Yorkers, Pegler-Gordon also shows how New York’s Chinese community resisted and organized opposition to these efforts. Closing the Golden Door details how Chinese civil rights leaders and community organizations responded to attacks on their communities by protesting expulsion efforts, mounting legal challenges, and organizing legal support to aid those being targeted. Refusal to obey the laws and defying immigration officials sometimes became individual expressions of civil disobedience. Community resistance is a consistent thread throughout the book.

Closing the Golden Door’s most unique contribution is its examination of the experiences of sailors, smugglers, and stowaways. Attention to and information about these migrant populations are scant likely because they were seen as neither immigrants or nonimmigrants and scholars of immigration have tended to privilege settlement as a lens of inquiry. Pegler-Gordon’s attention to the experiences of these groups offers a perspective that acknowledges the multiplicities of Asian migrations, specifically that of migrants “often taking circuitous routes and engaging in secondary migration.” This book joins a growing scholarship on Asian exclusion, but it shifts the locus and the discussion of unauthorized immigration from land borders to maritime boundaries. Through this lens, readers learn about New York City as a central hub for seaborne smuggling activities along the Eastern Seaboard and the ways in which Asian immigrants became “active agents of their own unauthorized immigration.” Pegler-Gordon’s attention to the experiences of these groups — an exceptional class within immigration law — offers a different consideration that shifts the discussion on migration and exclusion.

Ellis Island’s transformation from an immigration station to a deportation and detention center was solidified during World War II with the administration of enemy confinement at the island.

Pegler-Gordon notes that the “role of Ellis Island as a confinement site was relatively known during World War II” yet the island’s history as a permanent detention station is rarely mentioned. Perhaps it is because scholarship on forced relocation, confinement, and deportation of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans have focused mostly on the camps in American Western states as administered by the War Relocation Authority and not those facilitated under the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). Likewise, historians of Ellis Island have privileged the island’s history as an immigration station in its earlier years rather than its role as a detention and deportation station in the mid-20th century. In one of the final chapters of Closing the Golden Door, Pegler-Gordon examines this relatively unknown narrative and turns the discussion of Japanese and Japanese American internment eastward by looking at the INS Enemy Alien Program, Ellis Island’s role in wartime confinement, and its impacts on Nikkei New York.

Pegler-Gordon’s narrative of Ellis Island concludes with a discussion of how changing immigration regulation and administration in the postwar period contributed to the end of the island. According to Pegler-Gordon the INS “engaged in a massive expansion of deportation across the United States” and employed diverse strategies and practices that “expanded, accelerated, and dispersed immigration regulation.” These shifts in exclusion and deportation policies transformed the need for and the function of a facility like Ellis Island. The final years of Ellis Island were marked by its primary role as a full-time detention center; a dramatic departure from its earliest years as one of the largest points of entry in the United States.

Closing the Golden Door provides a fresh perspective on the history of Ellis Island. At the intersection of US immigration history, Asian American studies, and the history of New York City, it challenges the centrality of the Ellis Island model and weaves together instead, the narratives and experiences of immigrants and nonimmigrants who have been obscured by the island’s history and its historians. It shows us why it is important that Asian exclusion not remain at the periphery of how scholars understand Ellis Island’s history. In locating Ellis Island in Asian American history, it provides a unique perspective on New York City that builds on earlier scholarship about the history of Asians and Asian Americans in the city.

Maria Paz G. Esguerra is an Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater College in Virginia where she teaches US history, immigration, and the history of the modern world. Her forthcoming manuscript Ruling Race: Illicit Intimacies, Marriage, and the Law in California is a legal and social exploration of interracial intimacies and Asian American communities in the interwar period. Esguerra holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan, a Master’s in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, and a Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science from Oberlin College.