Perec finished writing Ellis Island upon the completion of the film in 1979, having taken on the project to explore the ruins, “the place where place is absent.” However, today’s Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration comes off as anything but a forsaken ruin. Rebuilt during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and open to the public since 1990, it now has a Gilded-Age feel. Restored to its early 1920s appearance, there’s a sense of grandeur to the Registry Room. The building’s cafeteria boasts handsome Bentwood chairs and mahogany tables emulating the original dining room. The galleries devoted to the successful immigrants suggest that the process of receiving them entailed a restoration of dignity and personhood that dispossession and exile had threatened to strip away. Displays outline the medical attention that patients with curable conditions received before being released; the care taken of unaccompanied women and children while their male guardians were located to pick them up; and the support social workers and members of immigrant aid societies brought to the new arrivals, from donuts to employment opportunities in the city and beyond.

Not all the galleries present a rosy picture, of course: many are devoted to the family separations, deportations, tests and systems that Perec writes about, implemented to keep emigrants out of the country, such as the puzzles to assess “feeblemindedness.” One poignant display features the brief Biblical passages that arrivals over sixteen years of age had to read in their native language to prove that they were literate, texts revealing either some bizarre empathy or mystifying callousness on the part of the immigration officers. Take, for instance, the examples in Swedish and Rumanian respectively:

And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. (Job 1:19)

I water my couch with my tears. Mine eye is consumed because of grief. (Psalms: 6:6, 7)

This was, after all, the “Isle of Tears.” Récits d’Ellis Island opens with a sequence of the images and postcards in the scrapbook that Perec is going over before cutting to shots of the film crew aboard a ferry contemplating the same views — of a commanding Statue of Liberty and of the spellbinding waters at the mouth of the Hudson River. Both seem to be the only things that have not changed, but in not too long we realize that these are not the same waters that Perec was regarding in the scrapbook seconds ago at his desk. And they are certainly not the same waters as today: in the more than forty years since the film, gaps in continuity are instantly noticeable, especially the Twin Towers in the background, those emblems of a geopolitical order that was radically altered by their collapse on 9/11.

At the time the documentary was made, it was still possible to equate immigration with legal immigration. The civil-rights movement had warmed the public to the influx of immigrants and refugees and in 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson had abolished the 1924 national-origin quota laws that had ended the largest immigration wave in the US’s history: established by Calvin Coolidge with the triumphant cry of “America must remain American,” the quota laws embodied racism and eugenics, beliefs then holding sway over the public imagination. Denying entry to virtually all emigrants from Asia and Africa, the 1924 laws had also severely curtailed the entry of Southern Italians and Eastern Europeans while favoring the immigration of fair-skinned Western and Northern Europeans. (Previously, in 1917, restrictions establishing the literacy test and higher entry fees had lessened the immigration of unskilled manual workers, but the loudest of white supremacist voices had not found them exclusionary enough.)