Ellis Island Era Immigration Primary Sources

Emma Lazarus's poem, "The New Colossus," as inscribed upon the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich's poem, "Unguarded Gates," an anti-immigrant counter to Emma Lazarus's "The New Colussus" published in 1895.

Historical statistics on the foreign-born population of the United States

Testimony from the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

Emergency Quota Act of 1921.

Immigration Act of 1924.

Poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station barracks by Chinese detainees.

Leaflet issued by the Industrial Workers of the World during the 1919 Seattle General Strike, urging workers to follow the example of the Russian Revolution.

Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, a pioneering work of photojournalism (published 1890) that chronicled conditions of life in New York's immigrant slums in the 1880s.