Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning, to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Golden door or harsh prism? In 1892, six years after those lines by Emma Lazarus were inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, the new immigration station on Ellis Island nearby began screening steerage passengers.
By 1897 some 1,500,000 had undergone a process designed to weed out criminals, lunatics and potential paupers. In Ellis Island's early years, most immigrants came from Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia; later, the main tide flowed from southern and eastern Europe.
In the late 19th century, Irish immigrants had kept the combined Irish-born population of New York and Brooklyn hovering above the quarter-million mark, rising from 260,450 in 1860 to 275,156 in 1890 (an estimated 70,000 of them Gaelic speakers). Although this represented a decline in Irish-born people as a percentage of the total population - from 24 per cent to 12 per cent - New Yorkers of Irish extraction constituted some 40 per cent of the city's population in the mid-1880s, 5 per cent more than the second-ranked German Americans.
The metropolitan area thus retained a pronounced Irish flavour, with the heaviest concentrations in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen and Brooklyn's Navy Yard and Red Hook districts.
Given the amount of green worn now in New York City around St Patrick's Day, it requires a stretch of the imagination to recall that an Orange march was forced down Eighth Avenue in 1871. Over 60 civilians, mostly Irish labourers, were killed; one Orangeman was wounded.
The Irish exodus had peaked in the 1850s. Famine refugees entered North America mainly through Canadian ports, the fare being cheaper and entry conditions less restrictive. In the summer of 1847, a fever epidemic broke out on Grosse Île quarantine station. More than 5,000 emigrants, fleeing famine and pestilence in Ireland, found in America but a grave.
Their mass graves are still visible and tended carefully by the Québécois authorities. Indeed, Grosse Île is the most significant monument to our diaspora.
Annie Moore of Cork was the first of 700 immigrants to disembark from three ships that lay offshore from the new processing station on Ellis Island in 1892. Aged 15, she and her two younger brothers were reunited with their parents, who had gone to New York three years earlier. In 1993, President Robinson unveiled a bronze statue of Annie Moore on the second floor of Ellis Island Immigration Museum.
More than 12 million immigrants passed through this "gateway to America" between 1892 and 1954. Their silent voices fill the halls of the museum. One is humbled by the self-sacrifice of our forebears. A fitting memorial to them would be to show compassion to those coming to our shores today.
During its peak years, Ellis Island was packed with anxious and bewildered immigrants. Although 80 per cent passed through this filter of humanity relatively quickly - the medical and legal inspection generally took five hours - one out of every five was sent to the detention pens to await further processing.
Detainees were caught in a limbo of enforced idleness, suspended between fear and hope: fear they would be deported and hope that they would soon be permitted to land. Meanwhile, they sat on the hard benches and waited.
Perhaps the most poignant detainees were families waiting for a sick parent or child to be released from the station's hospital. A Swiss immigrant interviewed in 1988 recalled being confined on the island for six weeks in 1921, while their two-year-old son was dying.
One of the parents was allowed a five-minute visit, once a week. Anxiety over inspection and detention often caused emotional scenes - giving way to joy and relief for the 98 per cent permitted to land in the US. The place in the main building where immigrants met their relations and friends became known as "The Kissing Post of America". For the unfortunate 2 per cent of rejects, however, Ellis was an isle of tears. Although this number may sound insignificant, sometimes it translated into 1,000 exclusions a month.
The golden door was slammed shut in the 1920s. Mass immigration decreased as a quota system came into effect. In 1924 the quota for the Irish Free State was reduced from 28,567 to 17,853.
Emigrants arrived tired after a transatlantic voyage, much of which was spent huddled below deck in cramped and fetid steerage quarters. The processing experience may have been only the last of many indignities to which they had become inured. Nevertheless, Ellis Island is a place where the American dream lives on - a testament to human struggle and endurance.
And what of America's own dispossessed? Lawyer turned artist George Catlin was a champion of the Native Americans. He believed their genius of natural liberty and independence was being ruined "by the contaminating vices and dissipations introduced by the immoral part of civilised society".
Catlin travelled extensively to paint the tribes before their culture was destroyed. He concluded: "The North American Indian in his native state is an honest, hospitable, faithful, brave, warlike, cruel, revengeful, relentless - yet honourable, contemplative and religious being."
As one of those artists who did not gain wide acceptance because their work is disturbing, Catlin died poor. After his death in 1872, however, the paintings were donated to the Smithsonian Institute and are today recognised as a great cultural treasure. Catlin's Indian gallery is on loan from Washington DC and may be viewed in the National Museum of the American Indian, New York, until August.