"The harbor was busy those years, as ships poured in from around the world. Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty. Chinese sailors settled in what is today Chinatown. Millions more traveled under the Statue of Liberty and through Ellis Island. Jewish people escaping pogroms, Italians fleeing poverty, Syrians seeking economic opportunity. Each of these new arrivals peered through portholes onto a city that was changing as fast as the nation. They saw merchants peddling their wares on the docks, streets being laid out on a grid, buildings rising into the clouds. They could not yet see the nativism they would face, the jobs they would be refused, the landlords who would not rent to them, and the abject labor and living conditions they would withstand. But no matter how much smog hung over the harbor, they still saw an opportunity to begin anew."