When I was in North America for my doctoral research on Polish refugees of the Cold War this summer, I seized the opportunity to visit the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax in the province of Nova Scotia as well as the National Immigration Museum on Ellis Island in New York City. Both museums are located at historical sites that are managed by federal authorities. Twelve million immigrants arrived on Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954 when the tiny island in New York harbour was the United States’ most important immigration facility. Pier 21, situated on the waterfront of Halifax harbour, was open from 1928 to 1971 and processed around a million immigrants. Afterwards, both sites were left empty for quite a while before being turned into museums: Ellis Island opened to the public in 1990 (replacing the American Museum of Immigration on neighbouring Liberty Island), whereas Pier 21 started as a volunteer-run museum in 1999 before it was elevated to the status of a national museum in 2011.
Although Ellis Island is not the oldest continuously running immigration museum in the world (not even in the United States: the Angel Island Immigration Museum in San Francisco Bay was opened seven years earlier), it is clearly the best known one due to the vast number of immigrants that went through its doors as well as its prime location in the harbour that offers an amazing view on the city’s skyline. Not surprisingly, Ellis Island draws huge numbers of visitors each year. In 2019, more than four million people purchased tickets to the ferry that connects Ellis Island as well as Liberty Island to the mainland (the museum is included in the ticket)i. Even if we take into consideration that not all people who go on the ferry visit the museum, it attracts still way more visitors than Pier 21 that counted around 66,000 paying visitors in the last fiscal year before the pandemicii.
Photo Credit: Daniel Jerke
During my visits, I noticed that not only the numbers but also the profile of the visitors differed between the two museums. At Pier 21 I had the impression that I was the only visitor that was neither Canadian nor Americaniiiwhile foreigners made up a significant proportion of visitors to Ellis Island on the day of my visit. This difference might come down to the fact that Halifax does not form part of the typical itinerary of international tourists on their way through Canada. But I assume that this is not the main cause why the different exhibitions of the Canadian Immigration Museum were more directed at its own population than in the case of its American counterpart, because I made the same experience at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Pronouns like ‘we’ and ‘us’ featured not only prominently in the exhibitions but were also used frequently by the guide of the free museum tour I took part in. Although such a language is present on the website of Ellis Island, too, the guide I met there did not talk as much assuming a national bond between him and the participants of the tour. The reason for this difference might lie in the Canadian law which regulates Pier 21 that explicitly states that national museums are supposed to contribute “to the collective memory and sense of identity of all Canadians”iv. But the American exhibition too had a general tendency to view immigration through a ‘national’ framework that sidelines transnational aspects, like the contradictory effects of emigration on the countries of origin. Both museums tell fascinating stories, but those are essentially ‘American’ or ‘Canadian’ stories.
Overall, both museums can be recommended to anyone with only a slight interest in history and culture. But I had the impression that they have a tendency to circumvent or at least downplay controversial aspects of immigration. At Ellis Island, I was surprised that the word ‘racism’ was never used in the exhibition. The term wasn’t even assigned (or at least discussed) with regards to events that are (in academia) considered to be driven by or connected to notions of race like the extermination and marginalisation of the indigenous populations, the enslavement and exploitation of Africans or the almost complete ban on immigration from China at the end of the 19th century. Did the museum fear that the application of this term would get them involved in the race-related controversies of the present? In that regard, Pier 21 seemed more explicit to me, which might have been the result of earlier criticism that the exhibition downplayed the exclusionary elements of Canadian immigration policyv.
Additionally, both museums seemed to be rather ‘white’ spaces, in the sense that I didn’t notice a lot of visitors that I read as ‘non-whites’. That observation makes a bit more sense in the case of Pier 21, because the site operated during a time when the racist character of Canadian immigration policy was at its height. Consequently, the number of Canadians belonging to a visible minority who can trace their family history to Pier 21 is fairly low. While Ellis Island, too, was first and foremost a point of entry for immigrants from Europe and the Middle East, it also processed arrivals from Asia and the Caribbean which is way less knownvi. Here we should not forget that both museums explicitly cater towards descendants of immigrants by providing support for genealogical research on site.
Photo Credit: Daniel Jerke
In the case of Pier 21, I was most intrigued by a digital game one was invited to play as part of the exhibition. You were asked to make a decision in two historical cases when refugees had arrived on Canada’s shores: Baltic refugees who came over from Sweden in 1948 or a group of Sri Lankan Tamils arriving from West Germany in 1986. In both cases, their sudden arrival on Canada’s shores had sparked quite a bit of controversy, but the government eventually decided to let them stay (the overall results shown at the end of game revealed that so far all players had made the same choice). I wondered why they hadn’t gone for other cases that didn’t end so well. Take for example the “crisis of 1,500” in 1974 when the federal government had tried to deport hundreds of Haitians back to their home country despite rampant human rights abuses and against massive protests from political parties and civil society in Quebecvii. Is it because that case made the federal government look really bad?
My trip to Canada and the United States also made me curious about the European museums of immigration that have popped up over the past twenty years, like in France (2007), Denmark (2012), the United Kingdom (2013) and Belgium (2019). In Austria, the initiative MUSMIG is still fighting for a permanent museum in Vienna, while their German equivalent DOMID is about to open a museum in Cologne in 2029. Do they offer more of a transnational perspective on migration? And how do they take into account Europe’s legacy of colonialism both overseas and within? But that’s a story for another day …
Cover Photo: Skeezix1000, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11101808
i National Park Service: Ellis Island. Park Statistics. URL: https://www.nps.gov/elis/learn/management/statistics.htm (27.09.2024).
ii Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21: 2019-2020 Annual Report, p. 16, URL: https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2021/mciq-cmip/CC521-2020-eng.pdf (27.09.2024).
iii My impression was backed up by figures provided by Jan Raska, who is a historian with the Canadian Museum of Immigration, about the origins of visitors in 2019/20: Only around 15 per cent hailed neither from Canada nor from the United States.
iv Museums Act, S.C. 1990, c. 3. Assented to 1990-01-30, URL: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/M-13.4/FullText.html (08.10.2024).
v Compare Schwinghamer, Steven: “Altogether Unsatisfactory: Revisiting the Opening of the Immigration Facility at Halifax’s Pier 21”, in: Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 15 (2012), pp. 61–74; Dolmage, Jay: “Grounds for Exclusion: Canada’s Pier 21 and its Shadow Archive”, in: Ashley, Susan L.T. (ed.): Diverse Spaces: Identity, Heritage, and Community in Canadian Public Culture, Newcastle/Tyne 2013, pp. 100-121.
vi Compare Pegler-Gordon, Anna: Closing the Golden Door: Asian Immigrants and the Hidden History of Exclusion at Ellis Island. Chapel Hill 2012; Carribean Immigration: Coming to the United States, in: In Motion. The African-American Migration Experience, URL: https://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm@migration=10&topic=5.html (27.09.2024);DuBois, Maurice: Ellis Island sheds light on untold stories of Caribbean immigrants, in: CBC News, 26.02.2023, URL: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/descendants-of-robert-payne-nero-trace-their-family-history-through-ellis-island/ (27.09.2024).
vii Compare Mills, Sean: A Place in the Sun. Haiti, Haitians, and the Remaking of Quebec. Montreal 2016.
