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It was no easy task to photograph amid the turmoil and chaos of Ellis Island. As Hine later described his difficulties:

Now, suppose we are elbowing our way thru the mob at Ellis Island trying to stop the surge of bewildered beings oozing through the corridors, up the stairs and all over the place, eager to get it all over and be on their way. Here is a small group that seems to have possibilities so we stop ’em and explain in pantomime that it would be lovely if they would only stick around just a moment. The rest of the human tide swirls around, often not too considerate of either the camera or us. We get the focus, on ground glass of course, then hoping they will stay put, get the flash lamp ready.

Then, with his five-by-seven camera on a shaky tripod, Hine would take his photo. The explosion of the flash pan blew smoke and sparks in the air, startling all those in the area.

The intrusiveness of the early photographic process, combined with the chaotic environment of Ellis Island, makes the subtlety and intimacy of Hine’s finished products even more remarkable. The photos provide visual examples of the daily experiences of immigrants: an Italian family looking for their baggage; a Slavic woman asleep on a bench, her kerchiefed head resting on her bags; children enjoying a cup of milk poured by an attendant. A “Young Russian Jewess” stares away from the camera with her big brown eyes, searching for something or perhaps thinking of what she left behind.

Hine’s photos were posed, yet this did little to take away from their immediacy. One photo was entitled “Italian Madonna.” An Italian woman sits on a bench, her head covered in a black shawl and her young daughter in her lap. The mother looks down at the child, while the child looks at the mother with adoring, yet somewhat fearful eyes. Hine interrupts this classical- and religious-themed photo by placing mother and daughter in front of a chain-link fence behind which a crowd of young and old immigrants is milling about slightly out of focus. In juxtaposing the idealized mother-and-child image with the reality of immigrants penned behind a fence, Hine captures the reality of Ellis Island.

More photographs made their way into newspapers and periodicals from the camera of Augustus Sherman, an amateur photographer and inspector at Ellis Island. Sherman’s subjects were largely anonymous, with captions mentioning little beyond ethnicity and occupation, such as “Romanian shepherds” and “Finnish girl.” Even more than Hine, Sherman was attracted to the picturesque—Albanians, Dutch, Greeks, Cossacks, all in their native dress. He also documented the exotic, almost freak-show quality of some immigrants: heavily tattooed German stowaways, a Russian giant, Burmese midgets, and microcephalic East Asians heading to the circus.

The photographs of Hine and Sherman may have helped humanize immigrants, but they did not convince all Americans. By Roosevelt’s second term, the IRL realized that its earlier faith in the president was misplaced. Roosevelt showed little desire to push for a literacy test. His appointments of Watchorn and Straus meant that the guardians of the gate were more likely to swing the door wide than hold it tightly closed. Like Oscar Straus, Prescott Hall realized that those entrusted to execute immigration law possessed a great deal of influence as to how those laws were carried out.

Labor leader Samuel Gompers also joined in the call for restriction. A Jewish immigrant from England, Gompers admitted to mixed feelings, yet the complaint about low-wage immigrant labor was a natural argument. He blamed big business and “idealists and sentimentalists” for opposing restriction, but the National Liberal Immigration League was more than willing to turn that argument around. “The selfishness of their [union] efforts is perfectly plain,” Harvard president Charles Eliot wrote. “As a rule they have only been a few years in this country themselves and are now trying, for their own supposed advantage, to keep other people out.”

The test