Ellis Island
During and immediately following World War II, Ellis Island was used to hold German merchant mariners and "enemy aliens"—Axis nationals detained for fear of spying, sabotage, and other fifth column activity. In December 1941, Ellis Island held 279 Japanese, 248 Germans, and 81 Italians removed from the East Coast. Unlike other wartime immigration detention stations, Ellis Island was designated as a permanent holding facility and was used to hold foreign nationals throughout the war. A total of 7,000 Germans, Italians and Japanese would be ultimately detained at Ellis Island. It was also a processing center for returning sick or wounded U.S. soldiers, and a Coast Guard training base. Ellis Island still managed to process tens of thousands of immigrants per year during this time, but many fewer than the hundreds of thousands per year who arrived before the war. After the war, immigration rapidly returned to earlier levels.
Emory Ellis
Ellis was born on 29 October 1906 in Grayville, Illinois. He attended California Institute of Technology from 1925, attaining his PhD in 1934 in biochemistry. Apart from one year working for the Food and Drug Administration, Ellis remained at Caltech until World War II. Ellis' interests were in bacteriophage which he believed would contribute to understanding the role of viruses in cancer. He started work on their role in animals, but found that there were extra problems and expense related to maintaining the animals and so switched to phage. Ellis published the important paper "The Growth of Bacteriophage" with Max Delbrück in 1939. He gave up work on phage after this paper and returned to cancer research before moving to Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake from 1943, working with rocket-program employees as the onsite representative of Caltech. Ellis became Executive Director of the Office of Industrial Associates in Caltech for two years between 1963 and 1965 and retired in 1969. Ellis died on 26 October 2003.