The United States Immigration Station and Assay Office was built for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1932, and served as the entry and exit point for immigrants arriving in Seattle. The bulk of the operation was dedicated to enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which placed a moratorium on labor immigration for people of Chinese ethnicity. As such, around 95 percent of the people detained at the INS building until the 1930s—anywhere from 25 to 300 people at any given time—were Chinese, and most of those were men. Once the United States entered World War II in the 1940s, the INS’s detention focus switched to Japanese men. In the later part of the 20th century, most of the INS building’s detainees were from Latin American nations.

In this image a crowd of young Chinese men watch a game of mah jong inside the Immigration Station in Seattle. The building was used until 2004 when Tacoma’s high-tech Northwest Detention Center was built with a capacity of 1575. The Seattle INS building sat vacant for about four years before being purchased by private investors for $4.4 million, who spearheaded a major interior overhaul and reopened the building as INScape in 2010.

Handwritten on negative: Immigrant sta.
Handwritten on sleeve: U.S. Immigration Station - Seattle, orientals.
Date photograph was filed at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (date of photograph and file date may differ by a month or more): November 15, 1938.

Caption information source: van Huygen, M. (2017, October 31). The grim history of INS Building. Curbed Seattle. Retrieved from https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/10/31/16584504/history-ins-building-inscape-arts-seattle
Caption information source: "Old immigration building saw 73 years of continuous service," retrieved from https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Old-immigration-building-saw-73-years-of-1197635.php