Photograph by Paul Myers
Photo: Ellis Experience
Elaine Chu, an eighth-grader at Redwood Middle School, plays an emigrant from Poland during the school's first-ever mock immigration simulation. The entire eighth-grade class pretended to be European emigrants who tried to pass through Ellis Island in 1900. Adult volunteers played civil service officers, who asked students a range of questions about their education, health and character. The adults 'deported' students who exhibited traits such as atheism, anarchism and mental instability, and those who appeared to be lying. The school set up the simulation to give students a sense of the hardships that emigrants might have experienced when trying to come to the United States.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
