In 1910, the government fenced off ten acres of Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, as an immigration facility. This island had previously served as a military depot for recruits as well as a detention center for prisoners of the Spanish-American and Indian wars. Officials found its location advantageous for two reasons: as with nearby Alcatraz, the surrounding bay formed a natural barrier to escape; moreover, the physical isolation provided effective quarantine for the communicable diseases that American officials claimed were “prevalent among aliens from oriental countries.”

Over the next thirty years, some 175,000 Chinese immigrants, along with arrivals from other countries, would pass through Angel Island. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of the Chinese were detained until they could prove who they were, which usually required detailed investigations. Though modeled on Ellis Island near Manhattan, for decades the primary immigration gateway for the United States, Angel Island served a much different purpose. Ellis Island was a way station, with most immigrants processed and released within hours, whereas Angel Island was a long-term detention center, where many Chinese were imprisoned for months, even years. Looking back at how each was run, one might say that Ellis Island was operated to facilitate immigration and Angel Island to discourage it.

The Immigration Service used an elaborate process to inspect the Chinese. When a ship docked at San Francisco, the authorities went on board to examine the paperwork of the passengers. A few Chinese might be allowed to disembark, but most were ferried to Angel Island to await a more detailed review of their applications. At the station, government workers separated the men from the women, even if they were married, and then examined them for disease. “They are dumped together as so many animals,” an observer wrote:

There is no privacy whatsoever, and no means of comfort. Men and luggage are all thrown together as one … In one part of the room, in the men’s quarters, was a group smoking and talking. Quite far away was another group of young boys and grown-up men gambling. Some of them were not properly dressed and with hair uncombed and appearance not any too fresh and alert, the whole place has the appearance of a slum, such as I had never seen, even in our much talked of “Chinatown.”

It was an unlucky immigrant who fell ill at Angel Island. Because hospitals in San Francisco still refused to accept Chinese patients, ailing Chinese were moved into a wooden building near the immigration station that one official called a “veritable firetrap.” There were no separate rooms to segregate those with highly contagious diseases from those with milder, more manageable afflictions like trachoma or hookworm. When one Chinese man came down with cerebral spinal meningitis, the immigration authorities pitched a tent for him in a remote area on the island, where he was kept until he died.

Reports of mistreatment soon surfaced. In 1913, quarantine officers imprisoned a group of Chinese students at Angel Island for several days, for no other reason than their arrival in San Francisco by second-class passage. One Chinese man, L. D. Cio, was interrogated by authorities even though he had the requisite paperwork. Officials demanded to see evidence of the means of his financial support, forcing Cio to show them $300 in cash. Not until a telegram was received from the New York YMCA on his behalf (apparently one of his sponsors in America) was Cio considered free and permitted to travel eastward. Later, he described the Angel Island station as “a prison with scarcely any supply of air or light. Miserably crowded together and poorly fed, the unfortunate victims are treated by the jailers no better than beasts. The worst is that they are not allowed to carry on correspondence with the outside.”

(Chang 147-149)