People come from all over to find a home in Element City, but Ember's parents are among the first fire-people to arrive there. When their ship docks at the entrance to the city, they join all kinds of elements waiting to be accepted. Unfortunately, the agent doesn't speak their language, so he renames them. Their names were simply unpronounceable to the agent, so they became Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi). Perfectly good names for fire-people, the kids in the audience are likely thinking at this point — but they have nothing to do with their own language.
As the grown-ups watching will no doubt notice, this scene is meant to resemble how people at Ellis Island and other immigration entrances around the country entered the United States. While people who spoke English were able to enter with their names intact, those who didn't were given different names based on what the agent who was assigned to them decided made sense — or, at least, that's what many people believe. However, outside of some isolated incidents, Ellis Island officials were probably not responsible for the name changes that took place.
According to research conducted by Smithsonian magazine, many of the immigration inspectors at Ellis Island were immigrants themselves and between them were capable of speaking a variety of languages. Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak, German, Yiddish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Swedish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Czech, Spanish, Armenian, Arabic, Dutch, Norwegian, and Chinese are among the recorded languages spoken by agents on the island. The issue reportedly came from names being incorrectly taken down by staff at the shipping lines' various departure stations in Europe. "If anything, Ellis Island officials were known to correct mistakes in passenger lists," Philip Sutton of the New York Public Library said.
