One of the big issues on the campaign trail is immigration, both what to do with the 11 million or so people already here illegally, and the millions more seeking entry for the same reasons immigrants have always been attracted to the United States.

It wasn’t always so tough to get into the United States legally. Prior to 1921 we did not have quotas and immigrants poured into the country from all over Europe.

The major entry point into America on the east coast was Ellis Island, now a National Park. 5,000 immigrants a day once poured through its gates.

Once the prospective immigrant’s papers were verified, they were required to pass two tests: one for health and a legal test. The health test started with a long flight of stairs leading to the Great Hall. Doctors would observe the immigrants as they walked up, looking for physical or respiratory ailments. In the Great Hall doctors would briefly scan immigrants for other, obvious physical ailments. At best, immigrants were only subjected to a few minutes of physical exam, after which they would get passed to legal or marked with chalk. If those with chalk marks couldn’t recover at the Ellis Island Hospital, they were sent back to their home countries.

The legal test consisted of an interview based on 29 questions the immigrants answered before the start of their journey. They included things like, Are you an anarchist? What is the 4th of July? Who is the current president? Have you been in a prison, almshouse, or institution for the care of the insane?

There wasn’t a pass/fail number for the test. Inspectors were looking for subversives and other sorts of undesirables, but to a great extent the interview was cursory. 98% of the immigrants were passed and allowed to enter the United States, either into New York or New Jersey. From the time they disembarked to the time they were released it was only about three to five hours.

My relatives were among the tens of thousands of Italians who made it through Ellis Island in the early 1900’s, settling in Greenpoint and Long Island City in Brooklyn. The stories of their struggles, and the struggles of many like them are part of my family lore. But like most immigrants, they adapted and thrived and their descendants have done the same.

While some people believe some fluency in english and literacy was necessary for entry, it was not. Things began to change in 1917 as the United States entered World War I. In 1917 Congress passed legislation that required prospective immigrants 16 and older to pass a literacy test by demonstrating reading comprehension in any language. Then as now, ability to speak english did not keep an immigrant from entering legally. The legislation also increased the tax paid by new immigrants and gave immigration officials wider discretion over whom to exclude.

All this still proved insufficient to prevent most immigrants from entering, so in 1921 Congress passed the first legislation establishing quotas based on three percent of the number of people from a respective nationality already in the United States. This was lowered to two percent in 1924 and he relevant year for calculations was pushed back from 1910 to 1890.

To a certain degree the immigration laws were motivated by the large number of Russian immigrants (remember the Russian revolution was in 1917), but also Italian immigrants. Much like the current wave of Hispanic immigrants, the Italians did not speak english, were darker skinned than northern Europeans, and were often not well educated. And much like the Hispanics, Italians were vilified by some politicians, both for their culture and their politics.

Although no one disagrees that the great majority of Italians were hard working and good citizens, there were always a small percentage who were criminals or anarchists. The question often asked then, as now, was should the United States exclude an entire nationality based on a small percentage being dangerous or undesirable?

It was a different time of course. Anarchists did not have nearly the arsenal current terrorists do, but the followers of anarchists like Luigi Galleani carried out a series of bombings and assassination attempts, including the Wall Street bombing of 1920 that killed 38 people. Much like today’s terrorists, they were able to cause fear and panic in the populace, and at the same time get government officials to suspend the Constitution in their zeal to stop the terrorists. For an extraordinary look at that time with a chilling similarity to current events on terrorism, watch the movie No God, No Master about the FBI’s efforts to bring the Galleanists down.

The issues associated with the large numbers of people who wish to make the U.S. their home have always been with us, from the early immigrants fleeing religious persecution, to the ample waves of immigrants from Europe, to the Southeast Asians who flooded here after the Vietnam War, to the current refuges looking to escape the chaos of the Middle East.

Politicians grappling with the current immigration issues facing America have gotten caught up in the same fear of terrorism and anarchy that gripped American in the early 1900’s. The rhetoric is eerily the same. But it is a strong reminder that America has been through these things at many points in its history and has figured out a way to move to the future without compromising the principles of freedom that make immigrants want to come here in the first place. That is the hope of America and that is what makes America the most successful nation of immigrants in the history of the world.

After all, we’ve gotten out of tougher situations than this.