The immigrants you fear are just like your ancestors. Don’t fall for political fear mongering.

Growing up in New Jersey as an Indian-American kid in the 80s and 90s, I dealt with bigotry and prejudice. But the person who best understood what I was going through was my 80-year-old Italian-American piano teacher, Mrs. Baldino.

As I talked to her, I realized that what I had gone through was strikingly similar to what she had gone through growing up in the 1920s and 1930s. It was confusing to me, though, because some of the kids who were giving me a hard time were Italian Americans. Mrs. Baldino explained to me, “They always forget what their grandparents went through.”

That seems to be the case in the current political climate.

Immigrants are easy targets. They are not yet Americans. They do not vote. Some have difficulty with English. And when the economy gets tough for Americans, they are easy scapegoats.

We’ve all heard about the all-powerful immigrant who is simultaneously stealing our jobs and living off the government. And some of us have been led to believe by politicians that this wave of immigrants is somehow changing this country for the worse. Why do so many Americans, who are themselves descended from immigrants, believe these fear tactics?

The answer is that historically there are people in America who refuse to believe that immigrants coming to this country today are just like their ancestors who came generations ago.

Now, I must emphasize that the recent attacks by former President Trump and his campaign on the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, were not intended to refer to “illegal” or undocumented immigrants. He was referring to the entire group of immigrants who have moved to Springfield in the past five years. Why is that? Because Trump and his movement want people to be afraid. It’s time we stop falling for that. Why? Because generation after generation of waves of immigrants have proven one thing; their children always assimilate into America.

When immigrants come to this country, they struggle. It’s a new country with a different language, food, religions, holidays, customs, and even different measurement systems. It’s hard, and sometimes the best way to navigate this new world is not alone, but through community. So you’re going to go where other immigrants go.

We saw this for decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the Italianate tenements in New York. We saw it in San Francisco with Chinatown. Scandinavian immigrants settled in Minnesota, and Czech immigrants chose Central Texas. When I was a kid, Indian immigrants set up a hub in Edison, NJ. Immigrants settle in these enclaves and hire each other, open stores that cater to each other, practice their religion together, and survive this journey of immigration together. It’s easy to look in from the outside and become fearful and xenophobic.

But we often overlook what happens next. These immigrants have children. And these children, the first generation of Americans, rush headlong into becoming as American as possible. It’s hard, because they have to deal with the customs of the “Old World” at home and reconcile them with the “New World” once they walk out the door.

But they work hard in school, they audition for the football team, they cheerlead, they audition for the school play, they go to the movies with friends, and they hope to get into a good college. As they grow up, they get involved in their community. They join the military, they become police officers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and have children. They add their culture, food, holidays, and customs to ours.

The next group of children, the second generation, has it best. They are raised completely as Americans, but they celebrate the old holidays and eat old-fashioned food with their grandparents. But as the generations go by, something strange happens. You have descendants of that group who look at new immigrants coming in, and you assume that somehow the power of American culture is not going to assimilate them as well. It’s almost as if they don’t believe in the power of America.

Today Trump and MAGA Republicans talk about the MS-13 gang and Latino immigrants as if they were one and the same. We did the same thing when we mixed the Mafia with all the Italian Americans. Trump and the MAGA Republicans will tell you that Venezuelan immigrants bring Marxism. We did the same thing when we mixed anarchism with Italians. Trump and the MAGA Republicans will make you afraid of religions like Islam and Hinduism. We did the same thing with Catholicism and Italian Americans. Do you see a pattern?

It’s easy to look at immigrants and see the differences. It’s even easier to learn to fear and fall prey to a politician’s fear mongering. But if you really want to see how much immigrants love America, look at their children. Immigrants may not be as American as apple pie, but their children certainly are. And that alone is reason not to fear them.

Jos Joseph is a master’s candidate at Harvard Extension School of Harvard University. He is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and lives in Anaheim, California.