With a frequency that began to trouble directors of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, visitors to that famous exhibit in New York Harbor leveled a legitimate complaint.
“’This is a great museum, but my story isn’t told here,’” said Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island spokeswoman Peg Zitko, repeating what patrons had noted. “It wasn’t as compelling to them.”
This grievance is expected to dissipate with October’s opening of the first phase of the island’s Peopling of America Center. Its multiracial advisory board, of mainly university-based researchers, says the center will present a fact-based, un-romanticized panorama of those who’ve landed in the United States, how they got here and what they confronted during and after the journey.
“The idea is to fill out the story,” said American University history professor, Dr. Alan Kraut, the advisory board’s chairman. “This current [wave of] immigration promises to be the largest in American history … . It struck us that this is a perfect time, not just to praise immigration as a positive force, but to tell the whole story, including the warts.”
Presently, 38 million people in the United States are identified as foreign-born. That’s 12.8 percent of the population, compared to 14 percent in 1911, said Kraut, a non-resident fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
That current figure on the foreign-born includes an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants whose presence has fueled continued debate.
“‘America beckons, but Americans repel,’” said Kraut, borrowing an old saying, attributed to an anonymous immigrant.
