Angel Island Immigration Station

The station stands on Angel Island, the largest island in San Francisco Bay. Immigration officials chose the site for its isolation, believing it would keep detainees from escaping or communicating with relatives in San Francisco. The restored barracks preserve poems carved into the wooden walls by Chinese detainees.

Chinese immigrants had come to California since the Gold Rush, but after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 nearly all Chinese labor immigration was barred. When the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed immigration records, some Chinese residents claimed children born overseas, creating opportunities for “paper sons” and “paper daughters” — immigrants who entered with purchased identities. To expose them, officials at Angel Island subjected Chinese arrivals to interrogations before a Board of Special Inquiry about their claimed families, neighbors, and villages; any inconsistency could mean rejection or deportation. Some detainees waited weeks, others years, for decisions.

Immigrants from more than 80 countries passed through Angel Island, including people from Japan, India, the Philippines, Russia, Mexico, and, in the late 1930s, Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. In August 1940 the administration building burned, and the remaining detainees were moved to the mainland. Decades later a state park ranger discovered hundreds of Chinese poems carved into the walls of the abandoned barracks; the site became a National Historic Landmark in 1997.