Immigration At Ellis Island: The History Of European Immigration

Imagine coming to a brand new place where you do not speak the language, you do not know other people, the cultures and customs are completely foreign, and you had to travel for months on end to get there. Then once you had arrived, you were subjected inspections and questioning, at which point you may have even be denied access and sent back to where you originated. Ellis Island was a turning point in history that molded America into a melting pot. Foreigners of all different ethnicities and backgrounds were accepted into the country from 1892 to 1954 when Ellis Island revolutionized the population of the United States (Foner, 678, 2005).
When Ellis Island first opened, there was drastic change occurring for immigration to America, as newcomers docked from Northern and Western Europe, while more and more immigrants

It has been approximated that eleven million immigrants departed for all different regions of the United States. The busiest year of European immigration at Ellis Island was 1907, having over people processed with the most crowded day being April 17, 1907, when over ten thousand immigrants arrived (United States National Park Service, History & Culture, 2014). When the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, heavily restricting the amount of foreigners being able to be processed, it was able to enable processing at non-American embassies, the only immigrants to pass through the station were those who had problems with their immigration paperwork such as any handicapped, or refugees from war. In present day, millions of Americans can trace their ancestry to the immigrants who first arrived in America from Ellis Island before moving to a variety of states (United States National Park Service, History & Culture,