Some of us are born to citizenship, while others of us choose the nation we come to call home. My grandfather (my father’s father) came to the United States as a teenager in 1907 from Greece. His eventual wife’s family left Denmark only a few years before that to move to New York City. My own son also chose America over a quarter of a century ago to make America his home as well. We are a nation of immigrants. I’m still gobsmacked that people can do that even though my family is rife with immigrants. Imagine emigrating in the late 1800s or early 1900s from Europe to the US, coming to a new place where you know almost no one, didn’t speak the language, and had no job or place to live; how does one do that? The fear of the unknown–as scary as that can be–has to be less than the fear of what one is leaving behind. Yet, that’s what over 12 million people did, first entering the United States through the immigration processing center known as Ellis Island in New York harbor.

One such family was the Beilins. They came from what is now the Siberian steppes of Czarist Russia in 1893. Moses, the dad, an itinerant cantor, and Lena, his wife, and the mother of eight children, came to the US like many other Jewish families did because their lives had simply become untenable in their native land. Isn’t that why many people emigrate? They were processed at Ellis Island, the children put in a pen, separated from their parents, until it could be determined that they had no infectious diseases and were deemed fit to enter. Moses managed to find a couple of rooms in a dank, moldy basement in New York for the family to live in. While Lena worked to make the dark, musty place a home, Moses found basic, honest work in a kosher butcher shop. The children were expected to contribute to the household income, even some of those who were under the age of ten. For example, young Israel, when he reached the age of 8, began selling newspapers to earn a few pennies that would buy food for the family. His sisters wrapped cigars in a factory. One of the brothers made shirts. Every evening, the family would come home deposit their meager earnings into the lap of Lena’s apron as she sat at the small kitchen table.

But in those days before antibiotics, illnesses we can fight off fairly easily today could devastate a family. When Israel (the family called him Izzy) was 13, Moses died. By that time, Izzy had decided that he wanted to be a singer. He had inherited his deceased father’s musical ear, and he managed to get a job as a singing waiter. From that humble start, he began to work with musicians to write songs that other waiters would sing as they served. In an effort to both continue to support the family and take away his mouth to feed, Izzy moved to a boarding room, a “flop house” shared with several other young, immigrant youths. He would later describe the living conditions as something out of a Dickens novel. Izzy also made some coins being an early 20th Century version of a street busker, singing to passersby for a few pennies when he wasn’t at this regular job. And, at other times, Izzy taught himself to play piano after the restaurant and bar he worked at had closed. He never took a lesson, but he learned how to put together a song that people liked. Simple songs, he would say, songs that people could relate to.

And you know those songs well. In fact, Izzy’s songbook makes up much of the modern American canon of national melodies. Songs like Alexander’s Ragtime Band (his first hit), White Christmas, Puttin’ on the Ritz, Cheek to Cheek, Easter Parade, Blue Skies, There’s No Business Like Show Business, God Bless America, and dozens more made him a household name.

Like my grandfather, grandmother, and son, Izzy changed his name when he came to America. It’s a place for a fresh start, a new beginning, and the chance that, if you work hard, you can be anything you want to be. That has been America’s genius from the beginning, to a large extent. It’s not that the Statue of Liberty, which immigrants to Ellis Island would pass as they entered New York Harbor, represents freedom–even though it does.

No, to immigrants like my grandparents, my son, and songwriter Irving “Izzy” Berlin, Lady Liberty represented something more: Opportunity.