That was the greatest day of all our lives’: The migrants who passed through Ellis Island

Isabel Belarsky was one of the millions of people who were processed on Ellis Island before its immigration facility closed in 1954. In 2014, she told the BBC about reaching the gateway to the US from the Soviet Union in 1930.

On 12 November 1954, a Norwegian seaman Arne Petterson was questioned by immigration officials after overstaying his US shore leave. He risked being deported, but instead he was granted parole, and as he stepped on board a ferry in New York Harbor, he was snapped by a photographer. He was the last person to be processed on Ellis Island.
The same day, the island that had been millions of migrants’ first glimpse of the US closed its immigration facilities for good. By the time Petterson left, Ellis Island was mostly being used as a detention centre for illegal entrants and suspected communists, but for more than 60 years for many people it was a stepping stone to a whole new life.

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Situated at the mouth of the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, the island had been selected by President Benjamin Harrison as the site of a central immigration facility in 1890 when it became clear that the one in Manhattan was unable to cope with the influx of new arrivals. In the decades before Ellis Island opened, the patterns of immigration to the US had shifted. From the 1880s there was a sudden rise in people coming from southern and eastern Europe. Many of them were trying to escape poverty, political oppression or religious persecution in their home countries. But as President John F Kennedy wrote in his 1958 book A Nation of Immigrants, “There are probably as many reasons for coming to America as there were people who came.”