“Welcome home, sir,” the immigration officer said when I presented him with my green card at John F. Kennedy Airport in May. Three very sweet words, and they made me smile: As a South Asian male, with a Muslim name, I had hardly ever before entered the U.S. without being carted off to secondary screening. Now, married to an American, I was entering for the first time as a permanent resident.

And already I could feel the warmth of the American welcome. Here, at last, was a country where a document meant something! I was overcome by what must be one of the most unfashionable emotions of our time: boundless, unqualified love for America.

Just weeks before, in early March, we had been at 26 Federal Plaza, a bureaucratic behemoth in lower Manhattan, where, deep within a warren of foam ceilings and fluorescent light, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are housed. The paperwork was in—endless forms, passport photos, long-form birth certificates, immunization records, pay stubs, tax returns. We had paid a small fortune in legal fees and were now at that most coveted juncture in the life of an immigrant, a subject of lore: the green-card interview.

If I could establish that my marriage to the tall white man from Tennessee, sitting next to me, was real, I would become a conditional American. If not… My Indian mother’s words rang in my ears: “You will be arrested for green-card fraud and never allowed back into America again!” As we waited our turn, Ryan—the aforementioned tall white man from Tennessee, who also happens to be a lawyer—said with infinite patience: “That would be true if we were committing fraud. But we’re not.”

His belief in his country and its system astounded me. I had never known anything even vaguely similar in the places I came from. In fact, it had been a particularly bad month in the old countries. In India, where I grew up and where my mother lives, university students had been dragged off to jail on charges of sedition for attending a protest at which anti-India slogans were shouted. As for Pakistan, a crowd in the tens of thousands had just poured into the streets to bid farewell to the man executed the week before for assassinating my father in 2011. My father, then serving as the governor of the province of Punjab, had provoked the ire of fundamentalists by defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy.