Nancy Pelosi: Pelosi and Woolsey Announce Federal Funding for Angel Island Immigration Station

June 27, 2007 -- Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma announced today $750,000 in proposed federal funding for the renovation of the Angel Island Immigration Station Hospital building. The funding included in the fiscal year 2008 House Interior and Environment Appropriations bill will be used to rehabilitate the historic hospital building.

“Between 1910 and 1940, almost a million immigrants came to our country through the gates of Angel Island,” Pelosi said. “Immigrants from all over the world, many of them from Asia, crossed the Pacific Ocean in hopes for a better life. Their experiences are part of American history, and preserving Angel Island is a way to ensure their stories continue.”

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“The Angel Island Immigration Station is a significant historical landmark, which deserves to be protected,” Woolsey said. “It preserves an important chapter of our nation’s rich and complex immigration history - the often times difficult and painful experience of the hundreds of thousands of Asian Americans who came through the ‘Ellis Island of the West’.”

The Angel Island Immigration Station, designated as one of America’s Most Endangered Historic Places, served as a processing center for immigrants coming across the Pacific. More than one million immigrants, including immigrants from China, Korea, the Philippines, and Central and South America were processed at the station before it was shut down in 1940. The facility was used by the U.S. Army during World War II, then abandoned, and became part of the California State Park system in 1963.

The funds included in the House Interior and Environment Appropriations bill will be used for the rehabilitation of the Immigration Station Hospital building, which is urgently in need of restoration due to significant, ongoing water damage. Once restored, the hospital will serve as a museum, and as an administrative, interpretive, and genealogical research facility for visitors.

The spending bill was approved by the House today and must now be approved by the Senate before a final version is passed by both chambers and then sent to the President for his signature.

Source: Speaker Nancy Pelosi