30-year-old images show how little has changed in the plight of immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border – The Washington Post

In the early 1980s, I began traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border to take make photographs for my book “To the Promised Land.” I wanted to tell the story of people desperate to reach America. Although my own immigrant family had no visual record of our journey from Eastern Europe in the late 19th century, I’d always found inspiration in the photographer Lewis Hine, whose work in the early 1900s capturing Ellis Island and images of child labor that had stunned a nation with scenes meant to be hidden — breaker boys in the coal fields, doffer girls in America’s spinning mills, newsies, oyster shuckers. People who just wanted to support themselves and their families, not unlike those trying to cross the border all those years later. I was proud of the work I’d done — and then I focused on other subjects of social concern, the mainstay of my work.