Between about 1907 and 1917, immigrants queued at a registration desk on Ellis Island. A Bain News Service photograph catalogued by the Library of Congress shows a man waiting at the desk, others behind him and an immigration official seated opposite.
Entry into a new country was not a single decision but a sequence of registration, health inspection and legal review. This line was not the end of migration. It was the entrance to the state's work of recording arrivals and classifying who could be admitted. After an ocean crossing came the last few metres to a desk.