Common Language Project: Multimedia that Matters

Seattle's Ellis Island

By Sarah Stuteville June 19, 2010

A large abandoned building sits at the southern edge of Seattle's International District. You may have noticed it. It's surrounded by arterials and if you had to guess you'd probably think it was an old elementary school. There's nothing in the red bricks and tall windows to indicate the complicated history just inside. This was a processing center for immigrants from 1932 to 2004. Known to some as Seattle's Ellis Island, this immigration station on Airport Way offered a first glimpse of America to many of our region's new arrivals.

Story Transcript:

The Pacific Northwest first attracted Chinese immigrants with the lure of gold in the 1850s. The late 1800s saw an influx of Chinese laborers that helped build the state's railroads and worked in the region's growing industries. Many of these new immigrants passed through immigration stations, first in Port Townsend, and then, as Seattle grew, in a center above the Pike Place Market.

CHINN: The U.S. needed the labor to build the city.

Cassie Chinn is a historian at the Wing Luke Asian Art Museum. Her family immigrated to Washington in the early 1900s.

CHINN: So, for instance, the Ship Canal was built by immigrant labor; the bricks for the roads, paved by Chinese laborers. So there was a huge need, especially after the Seattle fire, for labor to rebuild.

But the boom times didn't last. And as the economy suffered, so did immigrants who were seen as a threat to jobs. Chinese immigrants were specifically targeted and anti-immigration laws that spanned the early 20th century stemmed the flow of new arrivals from China. Despite these restrictions, people found ways around the laws.

CHINN: If you were a citizen and you traveled back to China and you were married and you had a family, then your children would be citizens of the U.S. and so they could then come and immigrate as U.S. citizens.

This sounds simple, but it wasn't. Some people faked documents that claimed they were the children of U.S. citizens. These people became known as "paper sons." But other immigrants with legitimate family ties, even children, were held under suspicion in immigration processing centers.

CHINN: They would be held in detention indefinitely, they would be interrogated, and often these were young kids traveling on their own, and they would be interrogated to prove that they were who they said.

A new, larger facility on Airport Way was built in 1931 to deal with these immigrants, but as time progressed it saw many uses. In the days after Pearl Harbor was bombed, leaders from the Japanese-American community throughout Washington state were rounded up and questioned here. In the following months, these men and their families were sent to internment camps as far away as Idaho.

In the 1960s and '70s, the majority of people passing through here were Mexican and Central Americans, many held on immigration violations, and by the last decades of the center's use it had become less a place of arrival and more often a final destination before deportation.

STANSAL: I think the place is full of ghosts, is full of a lot of people where there was no hope at all.

Jay Stansal is an assistant federal public defender. He's spent years defending immigrants and refugees. He started taking on cases defending people in the Airport Way detention center in the 1980s when he was a young law student for a legal services nonprofit.

STANSAL: You know, I spend a lot of time with people when I would just say, uh, you know, holding their hand, crying with them saying, there's no hope, this is what the law says, there's no hope.

He's visiting with his old client, Many, who he met in the Airport Way facility in the 1990s.

UCH: So this is where I spent the most time writing to newspapers and friends and families and my own brief and stuff was here.

Many Uch is a 33-year-old Cambodian-American. He was among one of the last groups to live within these walls. The furniture is all gone but there are eerie remains: a lone shoe on the floor of the laundry room, a cafeteria tray in the abandoned mess hall. There's even a small laminated sign someone posted that reads "Welcome to America" above a clip-art American flag.

This is Many's first time back since the building closed. He walks slowly through the echoing cement halls peering out the grated windows of the large tiled cells, pausing in the basement processing rooms surrounded by a chain-link fence.

UCH: Either you sleep on the floor, so this would be packed with people waiting and sometimes they would have children here, too, because they had nowhere to put them.

STANSAL: In '99 we started representing Many and a bunch of other fellows that had been indefinitely detained in this and other facilities.

They were going to send him back to Cambodia, the country he left when he was 8, but Cambodia wouldn't take him and Many was held here indefinitely.

A series of cases has since ruled that indefinite detention, even for detainees with deportation orders, is unlawful. But at the time it meant that Many spent six months in Airport Way and got to know it well.

UCH: So you can see people walk by from the inside and if the window would be open – because it would get so hot – then we'd open the window and make conversation with people on the outside.

The cells that Many stayed in were right above the street, about 30 feet from the open sidewalk below, where pedestrians regularly passed.

Many says he and his fellow inmates often sought ways to interact with the city beyond their cells, shouting out the window at passersby.

UCH: Like "Hey! We're up here! We're up here!" attracting conversation, or like good-looking girls or something and it was like, it was like boring so that's why we did it.

STUTEVILLE: So did anyone ever talk back?

UCH: Yeah! They do, they make conversation, yeah, and sometimes you could have friends over – you could say, hey, come to the window and we'll talk for about 10 minutes, that is until the guards say hey you can't do that.

This building has a history of interacting in strange ways with the city around it. Cassie of Wing Luke – we heard from her earlier about interrogations – says stories of the Airport Way immigration station were often told in her family.

CHINN: My grandmother tells a story of how they would go visit. They would sing songs outside of the window to encourage them.

Many people Many met within these walls struggled between the boredom of their confinement and the uncertainty of their futures, and for some of them there was no encouragement to be had. There were two suicide attempts during the six months that Many stayed here.

UCH: One was hanging with sheets, strangled themselves, razor, yeah.

I asked Many why he thought they did it.

UCH: I think to them there's no way out, you know, I mean and they have no choice.

And the place does seem haunted. There are worn painted yellow footprints on the pocked cement floor for detainees to follow when they were being moved. Steel solitary confinement cells gape open into the halls and "the yard," a fenced-in rooftop, is scrawled with graffiti testimonies in melted rooftop tar of the names, dates and countries of those who passed through here.

For Many and Jay it is an emotional return and before they leave there is an awkward hug in the empty visitors' room where Many once spoke to his mother through the thick plastic window.

Many was released from detention in 1998. He now has a 3-year-old daughter, drives a delivery truck, and works as a community activist on issues of deportation and immigration. He still lives with a deportation order but is hopeful that a request to Governor Gregoire for a pardon may be granted this year. For Jay, it's good to visit the center on Airport Way one last time.

STANSAL: I'd say it's good to see it dismantled, I hope to see the whole system dismantled someday and we can just live on the planet as brothers and sisters as I think we were meant to, to begin with.

Plans to convert the building on Airport Way to office space begin early next year. But the closing of this center did not mean the end of immigration detention centers in the Puget Sound area. A new, much larger facility below downtown Tacoma opened in 2004, and, with it, the beginning of a new chapter in the history of immigration in our region.

I'm Sarah Stuteville for KUOW.

This story was produced for the KUOW Program Venture Fund. It originally aired Feb. 23, 2010, on KUOW 94.9 Seattle.