Next year, America turns 250. But are we ready to celebrate her?

It doesn’t always seem so. Minneapolis mayoral hopeful Omar Fateh calls Somalia “our home.” Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez tells a cheering crowd, “I am a proud Guatemalan before I am American.” Both were born here. I wasn’t. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that I love this country more than they do.

I moved to America nearly a decade ago. I’ve worked in conservative media — first at Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, then at Fox. Most of my friends are conservatives from the South and Midwest who moved to D.C. or New York for work. I know how they see immigration: legal is good, illegal is bad. I also know how many city liberals see it: fine, as long as immigrants don’t show up in front of their family home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

In my spare time, I host events for legal, skilled immigrants — people building companies, filing patents, contributing to America’s economy. Most of them didn’t come here chasing abstract American “liberty,” and they don’t spend much time thinking about our founding ideals. They came for opportunity. They came to make money.

I try to sell them on America, not just as a visa-granting machine or a place to quickly cash out, but as a nation — one with a history, culture, and set of values — and that’s not easy. Too often, they think I’m selling them “whiteness.” Why? Because we’ve convinced ourselves expecting people to assimilate is bigoted and racist.

As a result, we’ve swung hard in the opposite direction — tolerating enclaves that barely assimilate at all, cities dominated by foreign flags, foreign languages, foreign cultures (Dearborn Heights, MI is a good example). In June, illegal immigrants and American-born citizens waved Mexican flags defiantly over burning cars in major American neighborhoods. At the same time, corporate America and our media class eagerly celebrate every heritage month, but treat Memorial Day like an awkward obligation and the Fourth of July as little more than a long weekend.

This isn’t some right-wing reflex, either. Obama admitted feeling the same way in The Audacity of Hope:

If I’m honest with myself, I must admit that I’m not entirely immune to such nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.

Before coming to America, I’d lived in India and the UK. In India, I couldn’t get past the weight of collectivism. In the UK, I couldn’t get past the skepticism. And for me, vibe matters. If I’m surrounded by collectivists or skeptics, I can’t breathe.

America was different. Here I found irrational optimists. Whacky dudes who obsess over ideas. And when I found that? My gratitude was overwhelming.

I share no blood with the Scots-Irish settlers who came to Appalachia, nor the Irish, Italian, and other earlier waves of immigrants, including the WASP settlers who came before them. But I find myself drawn to their stories. They often arrived fleeing persecution or political upheaval. They didn’t come here for handouts. Many of them had nowhere else to go. They were forced to plant roots, to build this country, and, eventually, to assimilate, meaning: to give up a part of their identity in order to become American. Which they did, willingly, even after facing resistance, because they believed in the American project and knew assimilation was the price of entry.

Today’s picture is more complicated.