When I was spending this past July 4th with my family and friends, I couldn’t help but notice that I spent this holiday with many people who were not born in this country.
My twin brother and I were the first in our family to be born in America. It was the immigrants in my family (my parents, grandparents, and older brother) who taught us to appreciate how lucky we were to live in this country.
In December 2006, my father told me, “Today is exactly 28 years since I left Russia. Every day I wake up, I am glad that I am living in this country.”
It’s been over 45 years since they left, and my father is very glad that he has never returned to Russia. My mother went back twice to visit her friends and relatives.
For the first 14 years of my life, I grew up on a remarkable street with 12 houses in the town of Brighton, which is a suburb of Rochester, N.Y. When I lived on French Meadow Lane, there were immigrants from Russia, Poland, Cuba, India, Pakistan, Israel, Belarus, Latvia, Moldova, Japan, South Korea, Finland and South Africa.
In one house, a Russian Jewish family moved out and a South Korean family replaced them. In another house, a Finnish family moved out and a South African family replaced them.
When we moved out, a Belarusian family replaced us.
Some of these immigrants had children my age, and they could all tell me why their families came to this country.
For more than a decade, it became a family tradition to spend July 4th at a party hosted by my grandfather’s best friend and his wife.
My grandfather’s friend was born in Poland and his wife was born in Germany. They were both immigrants, and this annual party made me realize that one of purposes of our immigrants is to teach the American people to appreciate our country.
When I met my wife, I learned that one of the first things we had in common was the fact that each of our parents were immigrants. My wife’s mother was born in Colombia and her father was born in El Salvador.
When I was a kid, I loved this country innocently. When I became an adult, I eventually concluded that every country has a history of flawed leaders, but that doesn’t change a simple truth.
I have seen too many people come to this country for their freedom. Every life has highs and lows, but I never met anyone who regretted coming here.
When President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin in 1963, he said, “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.”
If you think it is bad here, there are so many other places that are far worse both economically and politically. We even have immigrants that come from other advanced industrialized countries.
One of my family’s close friends are immigrants from France. After over 25 years, they still visit their relatives in France, and they love their culture; however, they do not want to go back. They lived in America long enough to know the difference.
Appreciating America’s independence is inseparable from the immigrant experience. This is why Ray Stantz, in the movie Ghostbusters II said that the Statue of Liberty “appeals to the best in each and every one of us.”
In 1980, President Ronald Reagan said:
“I’ve always believed that this land was placed here between the two great oceans by some divine plan. That it was placed here to be found by a special kind of people – people who had a special love for freedom and who had the courage to uproot themselves and leave hearth and homeland, and came to what, in the beginning, was the most undeveloped wilderness possible. We came from 100 different corners of the earth. We spoke a multitude of tongues. We landed on this Eastern shore and then went out over the mountains and the prairies and the deserts and the far western mountains to the Pacific, building cities and towns and farms, and schools and churches. If wind, water or fire destroyed them, we built them again. And in so doing, at the same time, we built a new breed of human called an American – a proud, an independent, and a most compassionate individual, for the most part.”
The Gipper was right.
Robert Zapesochny is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on foreign affairs, national security and presidential history. He has been published in numerous outlets, including The American Spectator, the Washington Times, and The American Conservative. When he's not writing, Robert works for a medical research company in New York. Read Robert Zapesochny's Reports — More Here.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.