Peter I. Rose
After a decade of refurbishing, the 100-year-old immigration facility at Ellis Island was rededicated in 1992. Americans of different backgrounds and from different shores—European, African, Asian, and Latino—came to New York to pay homage to all those things that the portal to America was said to represent: shelter, opportunity, liberty, justice. One person after another extolled the wonders of “the world’s oldest democracy”; “our haven in a stormy sea”; “the land of the free”; and “the world’s only truly multicultural society.” It was heady stuff, the sort of imagery that makes one proud to be an American.