Immigration files containing a wealth of information collected by US border agents, some of it dating from the late 19th century, will be open to the public soon and permanently preserved, providing intriguing nuggets about famous immigrants and visitors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Salvador Dali.
But to millions of Americans, the real treasure will be clues about their own families’ histories in the photographs, letters, interrogation transcripts and recordings that reflect the intense scrutiny faced by those trying to enter the US during an era when it waged two world wars and adopted increasingly restrictive immigration policies.
Under an agreement signed this year, the files, on some 53 million people, will be gradually turned over by the Department of Homeland Security to the National Archives and Records Administration, beginning next year. The material, accounting for what officials describe as the largest addition of individual immigration records in the archives’ history, will be indexed and made available to anyone.
At present, members of the public typically gain access to the documents, known as the Alien Files, by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request. But that is a cumbersome process and can take months to produce documents — and even then only photocopies, not originals. Jeanie Low, a private consultant to family historians, says this deters amateur genealogists unfamiliar with navigating government bureaucracy.
That is how Thelma Lai Chang obtained the 103-page file detailing immigration officials’ interviews with her father, who immigrated from China as a 12-year-old in 1922. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act, most Chinese were then barred from entering the US, and her father used a fake identity, claiming to be the son of a family already in the country.
“I cried, because these are real documents,” said Chang, who keeps a copy of her father’s Alien File in her desk drawer at her San Francisco home. “All these years, my dad used to talk about how he came, and this is proof to me of what he went through. I mean, all these questions for a little kid.”
The decision to preserve the files is a victory for historical and immigrant groups that had been concerned because federal regulations permitted the government to destroy them once they were 75 years old.
The files contain a trove of information for historians of all fields. The file on Dali, for example, the Spanish surrealist who fled to the US at the onset of World War II, contains more than 40 pages of travel documents.
But the material will be particularly significant to the descendants of persecuted immigrants like Jews who fled Europe before World War II.
“For so many of us, this is all that exists,” said Rodger Rosenberg, whose great-grandparents escaped pogroms in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century. “So much was lost.”
The public demand for access to government records like these has been fueled by Web sites, including Ancestry.com and Footnote.com, which have made it easier for people to do research even if they have no formal genealogical background.
“Before, it was just microfilm, constantly microfilm, going through hours of microfilm,” said Adele Macher of Baltimore, who has been researching her family’s Italian roots for 17 years. Once started, the research becomes almost an addiction, Macher said as she pored over her great-aunt’s Alien File, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
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