Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation

About AIISF. Founded in 1983, the Angel Island Island Immigration Station Foundation (AIISF) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that serves as the primary partner to the California Department of Parks and Recreation to preserve the former US Immigration Station at Angel Island’s buildings, histories, and stories. Over the past 40 years, AIISF has secured over $33 million dollars in public and private funding to help fund 3 significant renovations of the site. In addition to fundraising for the site, AIISF also conducts educational and cultural programs to complement park staff’s programming.

About Angel Island. In the early 1900s, seeking to replicate the success of the US Immigration Station at Ellis Island, Congress appropriated resources to build a similar facility on the West Coast to enforce the U.S.’s exclusionary immigration policies that began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Subsequent policies such as the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908, the Immigration Act of 1924, and other laws were passed with the goal of restricting immigration from most Asian and  Pacific Island countries.

Although often referred to as the “Ellis Island of the West,” Angel Island was built to enforce the nation's exclusionary immigration policies targeted at Asians and Pacific Islanders. Compared to their European counterparts, Asian detainees at Angel Island faced more intensive interrogations, more invasive medical screenings, and longer periods of detentions.  Their experiences and emotions are told in the 200 poems carved by Chinese detainees into the walls of the detention barracks buildings.

Over a million persons from 80 different countries – including China, Japan, Russia, India, Germany, Korea, and Mexico – passed through the US Immigration Station at Angel Island during the period it was open from 1910 to 1940

Today, Angel Island stands as  National Historic Landmark that reminds us of nation’s complex history of immigration into America and our willingness to learn from our past to ensure that our nation keeps its promise of liberty and freedom.