794
Opinion of the Court
The United States' occupation of the land under the cession affected not only New York's opportunity to act in support of its claim but also the degree of attention that New Jersey may reasonably be supposed to have paid to whatever acts New York claims to have performed in asserting its jurisdiction. Thus, for example, a State should well know that the residents of a populated enclave of its land have wholly failed to register or vote; but it is far less likely that New Jersey was aware of such resident population as the United States did maintain on the Island, or that it had any idea that some of those residents were registered to vote in New York instead of some other place where they might vote as absentees. Governor Rockefeller put this point well when he remarked in 1959 that "[f]or more than fifty years, the question [of which State has sovereignty over Ellis Island] has been of relatively little importance because the Federal Government has owned and administered [the Island]." N. J. Exh. 123 (letter from Governor Rockefeller to Louis Harris, dated June 4, 1959).
In sum, the peculiar facts of this case affected New York's capacity to invoke a sovereign's claim as well as the significance of such acts it now adduces as prescriptive in character. New York's position as sovereign of the original Island
ing at the Island," post, at 822, Justice Stevens presumably relies upon the testimony of New York's expert witness Harlan Unrau. As evidence that New York provided this assistance, however, Unrau relied upon 10 letters from the New York City Police Department to the INS requesting information about aliens originating in Germany. These documents give no indication that members of the New York City Police Department were themselves present on the Island to question immigrants. Indeed, although the INS's 1942 year-end report mentioned that "the Army and Navy intelligence services, the Department of State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service cooperated in a plan whereby all incoming passengers, both aliens and those claiming U. S. citizenship, were carefully investigated," N. J. Exh. 530, pp. 8-9, the report does not mention that any state agency participated in the interrogation.
Page: Index Previous 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007