c. 2006 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ A trip to Ellis Island requires long lines and long waits. But it’s nothing like the anxious hours, sometimes days, of scrutiny once imposed on poorer immigrants seeking entry into the United States after two weeks in steerage on an ocean liner.

Our wait was more like the processing time for immigrants who could afford first- or second-class tickets; after brief inspection onboard ship, they were allowed straight into America. The theory was that anyone who could afford a decent berth wouldn’t become a burden on American society.

Others, however, needed to prove their viability as citizens by passing through a gantlet that rose higher and higher during the 1892-1924 peak immigration period when up to 5,000 immigrants passed through Ellis Island each day.

On this side of the pier, nativists demanded that the border be closed to those who would change the ethnic balance of America. They believed the 8 million early immigrants from Northern and Western Europe were the most desirable and that later waves from Southern and Eastern Europe _ eventually totaling 12 million at Ellis Island alone _ were inferior human beings, as were immigrants from Asia and Africa.

Immigration foes worried that unimpeded immigration would overwhelm the nation with cheap manual labor and shiftless citizens needing government services. If the drawbridge remained down, they argued, America would cease to be itself.

Anti-immigration rhetoric, ironically, has been a constant in a nation built by immigrants. Each generation of arrivals has tried to justify exclusion of the next. Today’s debate asserts the alleged sanctity of “legal immigration” _ as if early thefts of natives’ land, betrayal of treaties, strike-breaking thugs, tenements, child labor, predatory gangs and anti-immigration riots were quaint phases, but now Mexicans must obey the rules.

The debate once again perpetuates unfounded perceptions that America is “full,” that skilled immigrants will take jobs from Americans and unskilled immigrants will undermine schools and bloat welfare rolls. Once again, the nativist movement _ like the 1920s cry “America for Americans!” _ fears the ethnic balance of a “white Protestant Christian” nation will be lost if dark-skinned Catholics, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are allowed in.

As it was then, new arrivals show more courage, confidence and hope than those who bar the door against them. Early arrivals might have owned the mansions, but it was immigrants who built the great American cities.

It was immigrants who cleared and planted the farmlands of the Midwest and Southwest. Arriving with one suitcase and maybe $25, immigrants laid the railroads, mined the coal and iron, made the steel, built the automobiles, and raised the corn and wheat that enabled the U.S. to go from a bankrupt nation mired in civil strife to a great industrial nation.

Immigrants established churches, learned English, studied for citizenship, and showed a zeal for family, education and civic duty. One of them, a Siberian Jew who arrived a year after Ellis Island opened, served in World War I and wrote a song aimed at fellow immigrants: “Let’s All Be Americans Now.” Later, as the nation remained mired in the Depression, this grateful immigrant wrote “God Bless America.” His name was Irving Berlin.

The same is true now, and, yes, the ethnic balance continues to change. A teacher in the Bronx says her best students are newly arrived Muslims. The crowd I saw last weekend taking photos beside the Statue of Liberty and walking solemnly through nearby Ellis Island had more dark-skinned people than light-skinned.

Those who fear and fight immigration should endure the lines at Ellis Island. They should see its record of what actually happens when a nation welcomes the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

KRE/PH END EHRICH

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