but at that very moment a whole series of laws was being enacted
to control and later compress
the influx of emigrants

from one year to the next the conditions of entry became more
and more stringent, and the doors gradually swung shut on
that legendary America, the El Dorado of modern times, where
— as little children in Europe were told — the streets were
paved with gold, and the land was so vast and bountiful that
there was room in it for everyone

four million immigrants came from Ireland

four hundred thousand immigrants came from Turkey
and Armenia

five million immigrants came from Sicily and Italy

six million immigrants came from Germany

four hundred thousand immigrants came from Holland

three million immigrants came from Austria and Hungary

six hundred thousand immigrants came from Greece

six hundred thousand immigrants came from Bohemia
and Moravia

three million five hundred thousand immigrants came from
Russia and the Ukraine

one million immigrants came from Sweden

three hundred thousand immigrants came from Romania
and Bulgaria

for immigrants disembarking for the first time at Battery Park, it didn’t take long to realize that what they had been told about America the Beautiful was not entirely accurate: the land might belong to everyone, but those who had arrived first had already helped themselves liberally; the only thing left for them to do was bundle themselves ten to a room into the windowless slums of the Lower East Side and start working fifteen hours a day. Turkeys didn’t tumble onto their plates fully cooked, and the streets of New York were not paved with gold — in fact, most of them weren’t paved at all. And they then understood that it was precisely in order to pave them that they had been brought over: to pave streets, to dig tunnels and canals, to build roads, bridges, giant dams and railroads, to clear forests, to work mines and quarries, to manufacture automobiles and cigars, carbines and three-piece suits, shoes, chewing gum, corned beef, and soap, and to raise skyscrapers even higher than those they had gazed on at their arrival.

Afterword

There he is, Georges Perec on site, in one of the immigration center’s old buildings, during the 1978 filming of Récits d’Ellis Island (he wrote the narration that is the book now in your hands). We see him at a borrowed writing table, on his visit with the director Robert Bober and his crew to Ellis Island, that port of entry into “the land of the free” — at least, at first sight, to the weary eyes of the emigrants arriving on its shores, fleeing poverty, war, and persecution.

Ellis Island’s spell as an immigration center was relatively brief, lasting only thirty-two years, from 1892 to 1924, after which — until its closure in 1954 — it served only as a detention center, as Perec reminds us. Yet it looms large in the collective imagination of a nation that has long prided itself on having been built by immigrants. It figures too in the family histories of those who were barred entry to the US and were deported back to Europe or elsewhere, which was the case for Bober’s Polish great-grandfather, who, inspected on arrival at the island, had tested positive for trachoma, a contagious bacterial eye infection that can lead to blindness and for which there was then no effective cure. Along with other infectious cases — as well as criminals, anarchists and those deemed physically or mentally deficient (and therefore considered liable to become a public charge) — he was put on a steamship back to the Old World and never set foot in the US.