Immigration is a hot topic.

I’m not sure why. We are all immigrants. Even the Pope is an immigrant. Let’s face it: people of all races move around. And it’s a good thing, I think.

I have a patient whom I enjoy seeing because he’s a “paisan,” a fellow Italian-American named Frank. Frank told me how, when he was growing up in New London, his lunch was Italian cold-cuts with roasted peppers and olive oil on fresh Italian bread. His Irish friends at school thought his lunch looked great. Frank was fascinated by their lunch. He’d never seen peanut butter before, so he didn’t know quite how to eat it, but he was delighted to trade his sandwich for peanut butter between two slices of white Wonder bread. Frank didn’t know about peanut butter or how to order food in a restaurant.

My father was an immigrant. When he came here at 11 years old, he was pretty much surrounded by fellow Italians who looked after each other. The first time he ever went to a restaurant was when the father of his best friend in high school took them both out. That friend was a Jewish kid, a descendant of Eastern-European immigrants who became my father’s college roommate, introduced my father to my mother, and remains his lifelong friend.

My mother told me the story of how when she was a young girl — the daughter of Italian immigrants — her friend across the street told her that they couldn’t play together anymore. The girl’s parents didn’t want her to play with my mother because my mother was Italian. So I’m sure that there was some bigotry that my parents’ generation had to endure, but by the time I came around, being Italian only seemed to open doors for me.

It’s also a lot easier for Italians, Irish and Jews to assimilate into the white Anglo mainstream — because they look alike. Not so if your skin is black, or brown, or your eyes have no epicanthal folds. Contrary to what some people say, it’s absurd to think that people try to come to our country to get a handout. Historically, it was the ambitious who left Italy and Ireland and Poland to come to this country. It’s not different today in Guatemala or Syria: risking a border crossing, “coyotes,” and traffickers in human flesh is not usually attempted by a lazy person, or by someone looking to get a free lunch. Rather, it is the ambitious go-getters who leave their country to look for better opportunity. Isn’t that why our country is a nation of ambitious go-getters, optimists and people who believe in success through hard work? When the going got tough in their own country, the ambitious and tough non-complainers were the ones who packed up and came to America.

The immigrants I’ve treated as their doctor more often than not are so hardworking that they don’t have time to come to follow-up appointments. They pay the full fee out of pocket — which is usually double what the typical insured patient pays — or rather what that patient’s insurance company pays. No one ever told them to try to negotiate insurance company rates.

Perhaps the best way to assimilate is to do it over lunch. Eating another person’s tasty ethnic dish goes a long way toward obliterating the notion that a person’s ethnic difference is anything but a good thing. Otherwise we’d all be eating Wonder bread and peanut butter.