The National Park Service this week released a plan to restore 30 deteriorating buildings on Ellis Island. The price tag on the project is $300 million, which would be raised together with a private group, Save Ellis Island, from government and private sources. Many of the 20 million visitors who have passed through the Ellis Island National Immigration Museum since it opened in 1990 don’t realize that while the main building that houses the museum has been splendidly restored, the rest of the island’s buildings are dilapidated, in a state of abandonment. The Park Service’s “preferred alternative” involves rehabilitating the buildings into a conference center with 250 overnight guest rooms. Other buildings would house an “Ellis Island Institute” that, the plan says, “would host meetings, retreats, and workshops on issues such as immigration, world migration, public health, cultural and ethnic diversity, family history, and historic preservation.” The institute, the Park Service plan says, “would provide a new international forum to present and discuss historic and contemporary issues associated with world migration and public health.”

Ellis Island is a beautiful spot in New York Harbor, a stirring symbol of America as a nation of immigrants, and an important part of the family histories of many Americans. The president of Save Ellis Island, Judith McAlpin, said that 40% of Americans today can trace their ancestry to immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island. In addition, the island is a significant tourist attraction, with all the attendant economic benefits for New York. It’d be worth funding the preservation of the island’s historic structures for those reasons alone.

But if this newly proposed Ellis Island Institute is to become a serious organization and not a playpen for political correctness, the Park Service, and the potential funders, will have to take care. Many of the decaying structures were used as hospitals to quarantine or treat sick immigrants, which accounts for the presence of “public health” on the institute’s agenda. What’s to prevent the new institute from becoming a platform for the anti-cigarette fanatics and the militant distributors of condoms? “It’s something that needs to be looked at very carefully,” acknowledges Ms. McAlpin. She speaks of the need for a “balanced” leadership of the institute and of potential partner ships with the Russell Sage Foundation, which studies immigration, or with academic institutions such as Columbia, Harvard, New York University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Pittsburgh.” At times the debate will be pretty lively,” she promises. Here’s hoping that if a new research institute is established on Ellis Island, its program is faithful to the ideals of freedom, growth, and opportunity that inspired so many to make the passage to America’s shores.