This Day in History - December 31th
Starring - Ellis Island
Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor, the wretched refuse of your teaming shore, I lift my lap beside the golden door.
New York's Ellis Island opened its doors on December 31, 1890. But as the numbers of immigrants rose in the following decades, particularly as Northern Europeans were replaced by Italians, Greeks, Poles and Russian Jews, restrictions were drawn up to bar “undesirables.“ Ellis Island detained 20 million immigrants for investigation.
Families were frequently separated by bureaucratic errors. Difficult surnames were abbreviated and made unrecognizable. The buildings that stand today were built in 1897 and are now a museum.