Ellis Island and the Great Wave is the name given to the era of mass immigration to the United States, running roughly from the 1880s to 1924, when more than twenty million people arrived. Ellis Island, the federal inspection station that opened in New York Harbor in 1892, processed some twelve million of them before it closed in 1954. Most came from southern and eastern Europe and remade the country's cities, religions, and self-image, until national-origins quotas passed in 1924 shut the door.
Almost everyone knows the story: an immigrant reaches Ellis Island, and a harried official, unable to spell the long foreign name, writes down something shorter and more American. It is one of the most repeated tales in American family lore. It is also almost entirely false. Inspectors at Ellis Island changed no names. They worked from passenger lists written down an ocean away, in the immigrant's own port and often in the immigrant's own language, and they had neither the reason nor the authority to rename anyone.