On January 1, 1892, Annie Moore, a 15 year old lrish girl and her two brothers became the first immigrants to enter the USA through the immigration station on Ellis Island in New York. For the next sixty-two years, more than 12 million immigrants followed Annie's footsteps until the station closed in 1954.
Although Ellis Island became known as the "Island of tears," most immigrants only spent a few hours there, and only about two percent of immigrants were rejected for either medical or legal reasons. medical exams lasted a few seconds, and the immigration inspectors list of twenty-nine questions was well-known to the new arrivals. Wealthier passengers on the transatlantic ships didn't even have to go to Ellis Island, but passed the time in their comfortable cabins before arriving in New York. While first- and second-class passengers enjoyed the passage across the Atlantic on the upper decks, conditions for the third class of "steerage" passengers in the stuffy lower decks were terrible. Some ships carried as many as 2000 steerage passengers in crowded and dirty condition. In the early days the journey took six weeks, although that was cut to two weeks by the mid-1950s. To pass the time, immigrants played cards, sang, danced and talked. Some even practiced answering the inspectors' questions, and spent hours learning the new language. Today the descendants of the Ellis Island immigrants make up around 40 percent of the total population of the USA, and Ellis Island has become a national symbol of mass immigration in the search of the American Dream.