From the early-20th-century photos of Lewis Hine to movies such as The Godfather Part II, images of crowds and faces from all over the world enduring long journeys by ship to build new lives in America have been associated with a particular destination: Ellis Island. When the facility on an island in New York Harbor first opened its doors to receive hopeful immigrants—“your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” in the words of poet Emma Lazarus, which grace the nearby Statue of Liberty—in 1892, the first person to be processed was a teenage girl from Ireland named Annie Moore. When the U.S. government officially closed Ellis Island, then a World War II detention center, in 1954, the last detainee released was a merchant seaman from Norway named Arne Peterssen. Between Annie and Arne, more than 20 million people had been through the America’s most famous immigration station, according to The New York Times.
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