California’s Angel Island is often called “the Ellis Island of the West.” More than 300,000 people from 80 countries passed through the small immigration station off the San Francisco coast before entering the U.S. during the early 1900s.

At Angel Island, some 175,000 Chinese immigrants were processed as officials attempted to detect “paper sons” hoping to circumvent the racist law by fabricating relations to American-settled relatives. Few were ultimately deported, but countless were interrogated and detained indefinitely in wooden barracks.

After traveling across Russia to China and Japan, they boarded ships for San Francisco. Dozens of families and individuals ended up at the Angel Island Immigration Station, underwent medical inspection and were detained for weeks because they did not have sufficient funds to reach their eventual destinations.

175,000

Widely known as the “Ellis Island of the West” the station differed from Ellis Island in one important respect – the majority of immigrants processed on Angel Island were from Asian countries, specifically China, Japan, Russia and South Asia (in that order).

Most of them were detained on Angel Island for as little as two weeks or as much as six months. A few however, were forced to remain on the island for as much as two years. Interrogations could take a long time to complete, especially if witnesses for the immigrants lived in the eastern United States.

Even as they struggled to find work, Chinese immigrants were also fighting for their lives. During their first few decades in the United States, they endured an epidemic of violent racist attacks, a campaign of persecution and murder that today seems shocking.