page_title: Ellis Island
section_title: Immigration procedures
hierarchical_section_title: Ellis Island / Immigration procedures
caption_attribution_description: English: Ellis Island photo D Ramey Logan
context_page_description: Ellis Island is a federally owned island in New York Harbor that was the United States' busiest immigrant inspection station. From 1892 to 1954, approximately 12 million immigrants arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey were processed there under federal law. Today, it is part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, accessible to the public only by ferry. The north side of the island is the site of the main building, now a national museum of immigration. The south side of the island, including the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital, is only open to the public through guided tours.
  In the 19th century, Ellis Island was the site of Fort Gibson and later became a naval magazine. The first inspection station opened in 1892 and was destroyed by fire in 1897. The second station opened in 1900 and housed facilities for medical quarantines as well as processing immigrants. After 1924, Ellis Island was used primarily as a detention center. During both World War I and World War II its facilities were also used by the United States military to detain prisoners of war.
context_section_description: By the time Ellis Island's immigration station closed, 12 million immigrants had been processed by the U.S. Bureau of Immigration. It is estimated that 10.5 million immigrants departed for points across the United States from the Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal nearby. Others would have used one of the other terminals along the North River/Hudson River at that time. At the time of closure, it was estimated that closer to 20 million immigrants had been processed or detained at Ellis Island. According to an estimate by The History Channel, about 40% of the population of the United States can trace their ancestry to immigrants who arrived in America at Ellis Island.
  Initial immigration policy provided for the admission of most immigrants to the United States, other than those with mental or physical disabilities, or a moral, racial, religious, or economic reason for exclusion. At first, the majority of immigrants arriving were Northern and Western Europeans, with the largest numbers coming from the German Empire, the Russian Empire and Finland, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Eventually, these groups of peoples slowed in the rates that they were coming in, and immigrants came in from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Jews. These people immigrated for a variety of reasons including escaping political and economic oppression, as well as persecution, destitution, and violence. Other groups of peoples being processed through the station were Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks, Greeks, Syrians, Turks, and Armenians.
  Immigration through Ellis Island peaked in the first decade of the 20th century. Between 1905 and 1914, an average of one million immigrants per year arrived in the United States. Immigration officials reviewed about 5,000 immigrants per day during peak times at Ellis Island. Two-thirds of those individuals emigrated from eastern, southern and central Europe. The peak year for immigration at Ellis Island was 1907, with 1,004,756 immigrants processed, and the all-time daily high occurred on April 17 of that year, when 11,747 immigrants arrived. Following the Immigration Act of 1924, which both greatly reduced immigration and allowed processing overseas, Ellis Island was only used by those who had problems with their immigration paperwork, as well as displaced persons and war refugees. This affected both nationwide and regional immigration processing: only 2.34 million immigrants passed through the Port of New York from 1925 to 1954, compared to the 12 million immigrants processed from 1900 to 1924. Average annual immigration through the Port of New York from 1892 to 1924 typically numbered in the hundreds of thousands, though after 1924, annual immigration through the port was usually in the tens of thousands.
caption: December 2014 aerial view of the area; in the foreground is Ellis Island, and behind it is Liberty State Park and Downtown Jersey City
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