Even with New York’s complicated history as a port for new arrivals, the photographs this summer of more than a hundred migrants sleeping shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk outside the once-elegant Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan were shocking. So were scenes of young migrants idling on sidewalks, stoops and park benches, desperate to work but legally prohibited from doing so. For those of us who were once part of such a moment, the scenes stirred up memories and reflections on how different some things were now for new arrivals and how much they were the same. I, too, was once part of a migrant influx. In the years after the end of World War II, New York City absorbed a similar wave of immigrants — a large majority of the 140,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors who came to America between 1946 and 1953 — and it did so comparatively smoothly and uneventfully.

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Organizations: Roosevelt, Astor Library, Public Locations: Midtown Manhattan, New York City, America, Lafayette