Ellis Island is a historic symbol of immigration into the United States. It is where many Europeans and other foreign-born Americans got their start and will forever be remembered as a main immigration station in the early 1900s.
“Ellis Island, y’know, getting through inspection how terrible it was,” Nancy Foner, distinguished professor of sociology at Hunter College and Graduate Center in New York, said. “Most people got through Ellis Island.”
In fact, only two percent of the 12 million who landed on Ellis Island were excluded, according to Foner.
Though McCord Auditorium is usually filled with sleepy students, on April 2 at 5:30 p.m. the seats of the Dallas Hall lecture room were, instead, occupied by professors, students and members of the Dallas community.
More than 60 people attended to listen to Nancy Foner speak about immigration in the United States. The lecture is the 13th annual George and Mary Foster Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology.
“It was very informative,” Jim Farrell, an SMU student who has read Foner’s books, said. “There’s certainly a value in coming and listening live to someone.”
Many audience members sat intently listening to Foner while clutching one of her many books in their hands.
Foner began with a brief history of immigration in the U.S. She compared using graphs and percentages how immigration in 1910 stacked up against immigration in 2010.
In 1910, 14.7 percent of Americans were born outside the U.S. That number dipped into single digits for some decades in between, but by 2010, 13 percent of Americans were born outside the U.S.
“The U.S. is not experiencing a large-scale immigration for the first time, early 20th century America was as much an immigrant country as it is today,” Foner said.
She also explained how the types of people immigrating have changed over the years. In the early 1900s, more Europeans were entering America, however currently the majority are coming from Latin America. She also mentioned that Texas, California and Florida are the most popular immigrant locations.
“I was able to learn about the similarities between the current migration movement and the one that happened in the 1900s,” Kasey Yanna, an SMU graduate student, said.
The differences were shocking to many audience members who nodded or widened their eyes in hearing some of the statistics.
“It’s hard to get into the U.S.,” Foner said.
To put this in perspective, in 2012, a U.S. citizen who wants to sponsor an unmarried adult child from Mexico has to wait about 19 years before the application will be processed.
Though Ellis Island no longer facilitates the process, immigration is as present in the 2000s as it was in the 1900s.
