I can remember saying my prayers at night when I was about six or seven years old, and thanking God for letting me be born in the USA – the best country on earth. I still feel that way!

I was impressed and humbled by some of the posts on X this past couple of days by naturalized Americans who expressed thanks and love for this country. Here are a couple of them.

Olia
@OliaOnX
·
9h
🇺🇸🗽I left Moscow, USSR in 1989 as a political refugee. I was stateless and allowed only two suitcases and $100. I didn’t know if I would ever see my parents again or what the future would hold. As I boarded the plane, I remember thinking that I was leaving not for myself, but for the children I might one day have – because I couldn’t imagine succeeding in a country I wasn’t born into and knew almost nothing about.

Thirty-six years later, I am still in awe of everything America has given me. As an immigrant, I appreciate this nation on a level that many who were born here simply cannot. The freedom of speech, the Constitution, the boundless opportunities, and that unique American spirit are unmatched anywhere on Earth.

I am deeply grateful.

Happy 250th birthday, America. I love you with all my heart.

Afshine Emrani MD FACC
@afshineemrani
·
13h
My mother still cries about it.

Forty years later, she’ll be sitting at the table, and her eyes will fill, and she says the same words she’s said my whole life: “We had everything. We lost it all. And we couldn’t give you children anything.”

Mom, I have told you a thousand times — and I will tell you a thousand more. You gave me the greatest gift a parent can ever give a child. You gave me America. Nothing else matters. Nothing else even comes close.

Let me tell you what she means.
In Iran, we did have everything. My father spent thirty years helping build a nation — its cities, its schools, its roads, its hospitals. We belonged to a Jewish community that had lived on Persian soil for 2,700 years. We had a home, a history, a name that meant something.
And then, almost overnight, we had a target on our backs. Bullets cracked over our roof. Cars burned in our street. My father became a hunted man for two unforgivable crimes: he had served his country, and he was a Jew.

So he did the only thing a father can do. He sold everything we owned for whatever he could get, gathered his wife, his mother, and his four little boys, and he ran. Thirty years of a man’s life’s work — surrendered at the door, in exchange for our lives.

We were the lucky ones. That community was once a hundred thousand souls. Most never got out with what we did. Some never got out at all.

We carried away only what no regime could confiscate — our faith, our language, our poetry, and each other. And after a few years finding our footing, we came here. To America. To the one country on earth that looked at a family fleeing a regime that hated it… and opened its arms anyway.

We arrived with empty hands. And that is the wound my mother has never let go of — that after all they’d had, they gave us nothing.

But Mom, you don’t understand what you gave me.

You gave me a country where I could pray out loud without fear. Where I could speak my mind. Where a penniless refugee kid could become a physician, a scientist, an author — where the only ceiling was how hard I was willing to work. You didn’t hand me an inheritance. You handed me something no fortune in Iran could ever have bought: the freedom to build a life without looking over my shoulder.

That is a love only an exile understands. Not the calm, comfortable patriotism of someone born into safety — but the fierce, protective, almost desperate love of someone who has watched a homeland turn on its own people and knows, in his bones, how quickly it can all be taken away.

And that is exactly why I will never stay silent.

When you have watched a revolution promise heaven and deliver a prison — when you’ve seen radical Islamists and the intoxicating lies of socialism hollow out a great nation from the inside until it devours its own children — you do not take a single hour of American freedom for granted. And you carry one holy fear: watching it happen again.

I did not flee that fire to sit quietly while anyone strikes the same match under the country that saved my family. You do not escape the thing that destroyed your first home only to welcome it into your second. I love America too much — and I remember far too much — to let that happen without a fight.

So I spend my life trying to be worthy of the gift. Through medicine. Through science. Through my words. By defending the freedoms that saved us — free speech, free thought, the God-given right to choose — with everything I have. This country once invested in me with no expectation of return, only trust. I have been repaying that trust every day since, and I will until my last breath.

So this is my answer, Mom.

You did not send me into the world with empty hands. You placed in them the freest, most generous, most extraordinary nation in the history of mankind.

You gave me America.

And I will spend the rest of my life proving it was more than enough.
Happy 250th Birthday. 🇺🇸

God bless the United States of America. 🗽

And here is a reminder of how lucky I am.