Immigration Vocabulary
The reason someone might leave their country to escape war or hunger is called a "____ factor."
What is a push factor?
To keep things moving quickly, doctors performed this famously fast health check.
What is the six-second physical (or six-second exam)?
About what percentage of immigrants were actually denied entry and sent back home?
What is 2%?
Immigrants often moved into neighborhoods with people from their own country, like "Little Italy" or "____."
What is Chinatown?
In 1907, a record was set for the most people processed in one day. About how many people was it?
What is 11,747 (or about 12,000)?
This term describes when a person tries to blend into a new culture and learn its traditions.
What is assimilation?
This was the total number of questions a legal inspector would ask each immigrant.
What is 29?
If an immigrant was not allowed to leave right away, they were kept in this type of "waiting" area.
What is a detention center (or being detained)?
Once they passed, immigrants could go to this desk to trade their home country's coins for American ones.
What is the money exchange?
Before Ellis Island opened, immigrants were processed at this Manhattan site.
What is Castle Garden or Castle Clinton?
A person who comes into a country to live is an immigrant; what do you call a person who leaves their home country?
What is an emigrant?
Doctors used a specific tool called a buttonhook to check for this contagious eye disease.
What is trachoma?
Immigrants had to show they had at least this much money (often $20-$25) so they wouldn't become a "____ charge."
What is a public charge?
Many immigrants found work in these dangerous, crowded factories with very long hours.
What are sweatshops?
For many years, two states argued over who "owned" Ellis Island. Which two states?
What are New York and New Jersey?
This is the name for the list of names and information for every passenger on a ship.
What is a manifest?
If an immigrant was marked with a chalk letter "H" on their shoulder, what was the doctor checking?
What is their heart?
In 1897, a major disaster happened at Ellis Island that destroyed many original wooden buildings and records.
What was a fire?
This 1882 law specifically stopped many immigrants from one specific Asian country from entering.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
During World War I and World War II, the island was used as this instead of an immigration center.
What is a military base or detention facility for enemies?
These are crowded, often poorly built apartment buildings where many immigrants lived in cities.
What are tenements?
This was the name of the huge, noisy room where the main inspections took place.
What is the Registry Room (or the Great Hall)?
Because it could be a place of joy or sadness, the island was often called the Island of Hope and the Island of ____.
What is the Island of Tears?
This term describes the process of a person from another country officially becoming a U.S. citizen.
What is naturalization?
Who was the last immigrant to ever be processed through Ellis Island in 1954?
Who was Arne Peterssen?