Whenever my patient, Frank, comes to see me, I sit and listen to his stories about growing up. He was an Italian kid in Hartford who went to Catholic school with mostly Irish kids. But because he was Italian and his parents barely spoke English, Frank felt different.

When the teacher asked the kids about the food they eat, kids around the room said things like “hot dogs.” Frank didn’t even know what a hot dog was, and when he said “pasta fazul,” the other kids laughed.

Frank’s parents spoke a dialect of Italian, whereas the Nuns of Mercy spoke only English. There were certain things in English that Frank simply did not know how to say. Unable to see the chalk board, Frank was considered “retarded,” he told me, and was held back to repeat first grade. It wasn’t until Frank got fitted for glasses and was finally able to see the chalk board that he did well in school.

Frank became a bit shy during his early schooling. He was embarrassed by his differences — differences he now realizes are quite rich and filled with culture.

For Frank, like for many immigrant families, being an immigrant meant being different from some of his neighbors. Frank told me that there was a Catholic school for mostly Italians, but it was across town and too far for him to find other children or adults who understood his parents’ language. He has developed a deeper understanding of issues politicians like to talk about.

“Now when I hear about Spanish-speaking kids in school who don’t speak English,” he told me, “I wish people would be more understanding.”

Immigrants often find security by sticking together. I suppose that was why my parents were told by their parents to marry an Italian. Or why I know Italian people who used to drive to New York every week to see if any paisans were coming on the boat.

My father came here from Italy at 11 years old and lived in Southington where other Italians from the same village lived. Unlike Frank, all the kids he knew understood each other’s dialect and all of them knew what “pasta fazul” is. They loved the Yankees because of Giuseppe Dimaggio and Filippo Rizzutto. Sundays was a day for the family and for long “dinners” after church. Spaghetti with red sauce. Bracciole stuffed with garlic and parsley and cheese and slow-cooked in the sauce. And in the warm weather you played bocce with your cousins and friends after drinking espresso and eating “i guant,” sugary, lacy fried dough.

My parents kept up this tradition when we were kids, but, like Frank, it was difficult because there were no Italians around us and my friends looked at me funny when I named my aunts: “Zi’ Vicenz” and “Zi Antoniett.” They laughed at the funny way the names sounded.

Unlike Frank, my parents were educated in the U.S. and were able to speak with confidence to my teachers and my friends’ parents. So in a way, I got the best of both worlds. But growing up, we were not taught Italian and it was only in college, after meeting my non-English-speaking wife, that I learned to speak Italian. (Love may be a universal language, but there’s no way to say “pass the parmesan cheese” in the language of love.)

There is a true beauty to keeping the old traditions. It provided a nurturing environment that I’m sure is part of my parents’ success, and is also why they kept the tradition for us growing up. But at a certain point, “sticking with your own kind” morphs from a form of self preservation. For me it’s not at all relevant to live around Italians because I’m more American than Italian. Though I married a Northern-Italian woman, my grandmother, who didn’t speak English very well, spoke to my wife in English rather than Italian because she was ashamed of her dialect. The old “Italian” traditions my family kept and the words and language that were spoken in my house are about as foreign to my wife as “pasta fazul” was to Frank’s classmates. Still, my Italian heritage is, for me, a badge of honor, and in my adult life it has only opened doors for me.

I have patients who come in to see me who speak no English. Often, they bring a child with them to translate because they don’t have anyone else. Luckily my Spanish is passable, but I’ve often seen 12-year-old children tasked with translating some difficult things like heart failure, cancer, HIV.

We’ve had wave after wave of immigrants in this country, and it has been the immigrants more than anyone who have led us to greatness in science, technology, medicine, warfare, art, literature. The greatest societies in history were only great because of globalism and the contributions of immigrants. The science of medicine was lost to western Europe during the middle ages. The science was kept alive and developed by the Persians and Arabs, whose Muslim society was far more advanced than the barely surviving backwater villages of Western Europe. Only as farming and trade developed with the East did the scientific wisdom get transmitted to the West and allow for the flourishing scientific culture that developed.

The new “political correctness” may be to denigrate and prevent the “rapists and murderers” or “terrorists” who want to cross into our borders. (Although I’ve never heard an immigrant boast about being able to sexually assault women. I’ve also read that more terrorism in this country is perpetrated by American citizens than by refugees.) But I believe the society that will be the most productive in science and art in the 21st century will be the one that draws on the experiences and creativity of immigrants. Immigrants are the ones who have made and will make America great. Again.