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“He said, 'When the border patrol changes shifts, you're going to run.'”

“Everywhere we went my mother would make sure that they enrolled us in school.”

“Do you remember when your parents said you had to get married?”

Rosie's mother and father did not marry out of love, and her mother writes haiku as an escape. After entering a contest, a man comes to deliver her prize—a framed picture. Angered by this intrusion, Rosie's father destroys the picture. In her anguish, Rosie's mother explains her marriage to her daughter.

Brought to the United States illegally from Mexico as a child, Reyna Wences has stepped forward to make the case for immigration reform.

Because Najeeb Abreely remembers what it was like to emigrate to America, he can soothe the fears of frightened immigrants he must now inspect and question.

Margaret Batchelder writes to President Theodore Roosevelt to tell him how women inspectors welcome immigrants—with smiles and encouragement. Although not allowed to question the immigrants, the women make a difference in the immigrants' first experiences on shore.

After her father's death, Esperanza and her mother are left with few options and forced to flee to America. The immigration officers are only the first obstacle they must face. Beyond them, the Great Depression and an uncertain future awaits.

Medical and legal inspections were the first of many tests immigrants would have to pass on their arduous journey to establish lives in the United States.

In this excerpt, the narrator, a young Chinese girl, poses as a boy with forged papers, trying to gain entry into the United States. When she realizes the American immigration agents are checking identity papers at the dock, she fights past them and runs for her life.