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Alan Kraut says it's time to get the immigrant story right

The true tale of America involves far more than teeming masses yearning to be free — a story well told at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York Harbor. The first immigrant recorded to land there in 1892, a “rosy cheeked Irish girl” named Annie Moore, is charming to contemplate. But more and more modern visitors from Latin America and Asia don’t spot any of their kind there.

And what about the ignored immigrant sagas of slaves brought in chains from Africa? Native Americans who arrived in pre-history and were forced to emigrate out of the path of settlers? And Mexicans and Hawaiians pressed into citizenship through war and annexation? Not to mention hordes of illegal immigrants still arriving with no fanfare.

“It’s time to tell the story in all its fullness,” says Alan Kraut, chairman of the museum’s history committee, which has been given the formidable task of setting the record straight in a $20 million expansion called the “Peopling of America Center.” The plan is to free Ellis Island from its own immigration intake chronology (1892 to 1954) and present the nation’s fuller story, across centuries, coast to coast. With 12 billion hits already on the island’s limited family database, the craving for such information clearly has only begun.

The national imagination will benefit from moving beyond the sepia Ellis Island tableau. Wait till we follow the waves of Chinese from the Taishan region landing on the West Coast in the 1850s to labor everywhere, from railroads to mines, enthuses Mr. Kraut, a history professor at American University...
Read entire article at Francis X. Clines in the NYT