Ellis Island
Between 1905 and 1914, an average of one million immigrants per year arrived in the United States. Immigration officials reviewed about 5,000 immigrants per day during peak times at Ellis Island. Two-thirds of those individuals emigrated from eastern, southern and central Europe. The peak year for immigration at Ellis Island was 1907, with 1,004,756 immigrants processed. The all-time daily high occurred on April 17, 1907, when 11,747 immigrants arrived. After the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, which greatly restricted immigration and allowed processing at overseas embassies, the only immigrants to pass through the station were those who had problems with their immigration paperwork, displaced persons, and war refugees. Today, over 100 million Americans—about one-third to 40% of the population of the United States—can trace their ancestry to immigrants who arrived in America at Ellis Island before dispersing to points all over the country.
Clandestine HUMINT and covert action
In the years immediately preceding the Second World War, the U.S. had no standing clandestine HUMINT or covert action organizations. There were certainly examples of both, such as Marine Major Earl Ellis' series of visits, in the 1920s, to Japanese islands in the Pacific. Ellis, who died under mysterious circumstances while on duty, created the basic plan for U.S. "island hopping" operations in the Pacific Theater of the Second World War.