Why yes. I’m glad you asked.
First, a little personal context. I’ve just spent awhile trying to find a picture that has haunted me ever since I visited Ellis Island back in the summer of 2010. I think it’s one of the many blown-up photographs that line the Great Hall, the area where immigrants were initially processed, but I haven’t been able to find it. So I’ll just describe it: a woman on her hands and knees, with a bucket and a brush, scrubbing a hallway. Her back is to the picture and you can’t see her face. Out of all the old photographs I saw that day I remember only this one. To me it’s a representation of the life that many of these people faced. On that same trip we also toured a tenement museum, trying to imagine the lives of people just like the woman in that photo, living in crowded apartment buildings with no running water and barely enough space to breathe. People slept in all sorts of strange contortions, the most memorable being that of the boys who had their upper bodies on a couch and their feet on chairs. (Visit the Tenement Museum the next time you’re in NYC!)