As our country undergoes its once-a-decade debate over immigration, it is still helpful to remember a truism articulated by President Kennedy: “We are a nation of immigrants.”

From our birth we were unique among the family of nations. All Americans embody the genius of immigration and assimilation. It is in our DNA.

I am no exception. I am fiercely proud of being the grandson of immigrants. A footnote in their entry to America gives me a personal perspective on the current debate over illegal immigration as well, because I am the third generation product of both legal and illegal immigration. One of my grandfathers came to the country through Ellis Island, while the other was an illegal immigrant who stowed away on a ship and still managed to make his way in American society.

My grandfather Alexander Konstantine Phillips came over as a 4-year-old with his parents and spent four months on Ellis Island while the family was detained because his mother was thought to have a serious eye infection that would have required their return to Buenos Aires, Argentina, the city to which they had fled after the Balkan Wars erupted.

My grandfather John Avlon, from the island of Corfu, had a less Norman Rockwell entry to America. He was an orphan whose family had been wiped out by the Spanish influenza epidemic which killed millions in the aftermath of World War I. As a young boy of eight or nine years old he was helping load bags onto ships when he met an American who told him to make his way to the United States. Days later my grandfather stowed away on the boat El Presidente Wilson. It was 1920.

My grandfather Phillips was lucky enough to attend college and medical school, working summers in the Youngstown, Ohio, steel mills alongside his father. He served as a surgeon in World War II, seeing action in the Philippines and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. He returned to work at his hometown hospital, St. Elizabeth’s, and raised five children with the wife he adored, my grandmother Toula Carvelas Phillips, who still lives in their house in Ohio.

My grandfather Avlon was taken in by a Jewish family that ran an insurance agency in New York City. While he never had any formal education, he eventually made himself a success in business. Exactly how he received his citizenship in still unclear, but he must have done something right because he had a passport, paid taxes, and married an American girl. Forty years after my grandfather arrived penniless and not speaking English, my dad became the first man in his father’s side of the family to attend college and then went on to law school.

If you hear more than a hint of pride in my voice when speaking about my grandparents, I make no attempt to hide it. My grandfathers took different paths to reach America but they both worked hard to achieve the American Dream. The circumstances of their entry into the country were ultimately far less important than what they did when they got here.

It is easy to forget that the Eastern European wave of immigration, which overwhelmed our country in the first decades of the last century, was just as controversial as the debate over Hispanic immigrants today. Then, as now, there was prejudice and occasional violence. And then, as now, not all immigrants were saints. Some failed to assimilate or failed to fully appreciate America. Some resisted learning English and some returned home, but most added more to America than they ever took in return.

And so while those multiculturalists who disdain assimilation and promote an entitlement approach to illegal immigration fundamentally misunderstand American history, every time I hear someone like Rep. Thomas Tancredo characterize illegal immigrants as “a scourge that threatens the very future of our nation,” I remember that he could just as easily be referring to my grandfather.

If we have realistic faith in the genius of America, then it is worth betting that the grandsons of Mexican, South American, Chinese and African immigrants today will likely be telling their own version of my story 100 years from now. They will be living testament to the fact that immigration keeps our country strong internally, economically, and geopolitically. And if our country gives their families a fair shake, they will look back and say that their grandparents’ rise up the rungs of American society gave them sense of obligation to the opportunities they were given – a belief in the virtue of hard work as well as a deep sense of patriotism.

There is no escaping the fact that immigration is a family thing here in America. The specifics are all different, but the arc of our stories is the same. And when we debate immigration in protests on the streets or in the halls of Congress, we would honor our ancestors best not by retreating to abstractions but by remembering the individual stories we all take personal pride in. If we keep faith with their stories of immigration and assimilation, America cannot help but be better and stronger in the long run.