Via the Christian Science Monitor, here’s the Fourth of July story we should be really proud about in this day and age:

My father left a mud-hut village in Pakistan to come to America, hoping to receive some technical training. He hadn’t counted on falling for America, but that’s what happens to unsuspecting visitors. And the world is becoming a better place for it.

Dad enrolled at North Carolina State University more than 50 years ago and earned an engineering degree. On a brief return to Pakistan, he met my mother at a wedding – their own. As you might have guessed, it was an arranged marriage.

The prefabricated couple decided to spend “just a few years’’ in the United States because of the job opportunities here. But they took on more of America than they had bargained for.

That immigrant passion for America was first described to me by a university president who noticed that foreign students are susceptible to a peculiar effect that warps their plans and bends their dreams. If they return to their homeland, they wish it were more like America, and will work to make it so. Often they choose not to go home, or choose to return to America after a while.

The article – which you should read, all of it – swerves through how America can, and does, moderate extremist Islam, by way of explaining how and why immigrants “fall crazy in love” with America.

And this is a potent lesson the week after this country took its biggest step ever toward serfdom; why is it that people have been coming here for centuries?

For the goodies?

Or for freedom?