The dinner table conversations of my childhood were often about Iran, the country my parents had lost. But the life they built in front of me was about the country they had found, the United States.

My parents did not raise me on grievance. They raised me on gratitude.

It is a specific, unsentimental kind of gratitude that immigrants from unfree places tend to carry.

They made America home. They worked hard. They talked, out loud and often, about liberty and opportunity the way people who have lived without them talk.

And they made a point, especially to their daughter, of instilling something the regime in Tehran spends its every waking hour trying to strip from Iranian women: the certainty that I could do anything, say anything, become anything. So I did.

My father was, in every sense, the epitome of the American Dream. He arrived in New York City at 17 years old with a scholarship from the Shah’s government, planning to become a physician and return home to Iran to practice medicine. History had other ideas.

What followed was an immigrant story with one English dictionary open on the desk, a medical book open beside it, and multiple jobs held not only to pay the bills but to learn the language, absorb the culture and assimilate into the country he was quickly recognizing as his own.

He never made it back to Iran the way he had planned. He made a life here instead, and he made his children Americans.

That is the inheritance I grew up with. Not a lecture about freedom. An example of it.

From a young age I understood that this freedom was not the default setting of the world. It was the exception.

I think that awareness is the hallmark of immigrants who came from places where those freedoms are still out of reach.

Or at least it used to be.

Because you also see, in this country now, the children and grandchildren of immigrants pledging allegiance on American campuses to Hamas, to Hezbollah, to the same Islamic Republic that would arrest them for showing their hair or execute them for their sexuality.

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They chant for regimes that would silence them in a heartbeat and jail their mothers for less. It is the strangest inheritance in the world to flee a place and then romanticize it from safety. My parents’ generation would have found it unrecognizable. So do I.

Every time I sit on a television set with my hair uncovered and say exactly what I think, I am aware that I am doing something a woman in Tehran could be beaten in the street for.

That freedom is not mine alone. It belongs to every woman who has been silenced, every dissident writing under a pseudonym, every girl who wanted to be a journalist or a lawyer or a candidate or an artist and was told by her country that she could not.

None of it is my doing. It is my parents who taught me the love of this country. It was an American classroom that taught me the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star-Spangled Banner and a national history that, for all its failures and reckonings, has aimed higher than almost any other on earth at the simple radical proposition that a government exists to serve its people and not the other way around.

This week, that country turns 250.

For millions of expatriate Iranian Americans scattered across this country, America’s semiquincentennial is not an abstract civics milestone or just another fireworks show. It was the refuge my parents’ generation sought at their most vulnerable. It was a place that welcomed them, accepted them and allowed them to flourish into one of the most successful and educated immigrant communities.

I have spent my career reporting on the regime my family fled. I have interviewed its dissidents, tracked its terror networks, sat across from its apologists on camera, and watched, over and over, as it tried to export the fear my parents crossed an ocean to escape. And I can tell you that nothing terrifies the Islamic Republic more than the very things we celebrate every July 4.

Because America is the proof.

It is proof that a free country can tolerate argument, changes of power and social upheaval — and still endure. It is proof that pluralism is not chaos and freedom is not decadence.

On Saturday, my young son will wave a small American flag at a parade. He will not yet understand what it took to put that flag in his hand. Teaching him is my job the way my parents taught me. Not through grievance. Through gratitude.

Happy birthday, America. From one of the millions of us who knows exactly what you are worth.

Lisa Daftari is a foreign policy analyst and media commentator based in Los Angeles.