This is a column about two Americans, one born here and one born overseas.

Both witnessed extraordinary things transpire in their respective life experiences yet the American who was born here faced greater persecution than the American who would grow up under two of history’s most repressive ideological regimes.

Back in May Jimmy Dimos, a former Louisiana legislative leader, passed away. What made Dimos completely different from any of his colleagues was his childhood.

Dimos was born into a country that no longer exists (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and before immigrating to the Unied States had lived under both the Third Reich, which had occupied the Balkan conglomerate of Slavic peoples during the Second World War, and later under Communism with the establishment of Tito’s Marxist regime.

According to Dimos’ family, the future Monroe political leader had witnessed the Nazis moving people out of Macedonia (the Yugoslav region that bordered Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece) via trains while looking over a fence towards the end of World War II.

His family were unsure about who Dimos saw being transported out at the time.

Did he see the Nazis evacuating sympathizers before the approach of the Red Army and allied Yugoslav partisans on their drive to clear tge Wehrmacht out of the Balkans?

Or did Dimos, who would’ve been 5 or 6 at the time, witness a chapter of the Holocaust play out as the Germans accelerated the rate of ethnic cleansing?

Being an American citizen despite having been born on foreign soil, Dimos would find his way to Louisiana and in 1988 attaining the speakership of the House of Representatives during the term of reform-oriented Governor Buddy Roemer, where he labored to resolve the state’s perilous fiscal state left-over by Edwin Edwards’ third term.

According to his wife Dale, Dimos was considered one of the most prominent Macedonians in America, behind Little Caesars pizza chain founder Mike Illitch, whose parents gad immigrated from the region. Of course the most famous person hailing from that area was a diminutive woman born in Skopje named Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, better known to the world as Mother Teresa.

Though born an American citizen, Dimos was essentially an immigrant and represented how the circumstances of one’s birth need not act as a restraint to success in this land of opportunity.

Now to another witness of history, though one whose tale was of opportunity denied, at least initially. Yosh Nakamura was an internee at one of the camps established by President Franklin Roosevelt to remove Japanese-Americans from society after Pearl Harbor.

Later Nakamura enlisted in the 442nd Infantry Regiment, which comprised mostly of Nisei (the American born children of Japanese immigrants) who served in western Europe in World War 2.

Confined to a wheelchair and adorned with symbols of his military service, Nakamura was in New Orleans to participate in the.opening of a photo exhibition centeted on ethnic Japanese war veterans at the National World War II Museum. In a brief interview on stage Nakamura felt that he and his brethren had a unique burden to carry during the war to prove their love for the same country that had essentially imprisoned them en masse without trial and thus embodied the spirit of “Go for Broke”, a Hawaiian gambling term for going all in on a bet when you have little else to lose.

The service and battlefield valor of the Nisei led to the 442nd to be one of the most decorated of any unit in the military and played a role in easing the way for Hawaiian statehood.

Nakamura expressed his appreciation of an apology passed by Congress and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 for the internment of Japanese Americans (a policy that then-FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover opposed as unnecessary).

Despite the unjust hardships imposed on Nakamura and tens of thousands of ethnic Japanese by a suspicious national government, they bravely fought for their country.

For Dimos, America proved to be the very land it has been billed: a land of opportunity.

For Nakamura, he was suddenly targeted for oppression in the land of his birth only to be shipped off to fight far more oppressive regimes on the other side of the Atlantic.

This Fourth of July let us remember that the country conceived via the blood of patriots remains a place where success is limited only by the talent possessed and efforts made by an individual,  regardless of where he or she was born.

And that even a powerful nation is imperfect but a great nation recognizes the error of its ways without a foreign power present to bayonet a mea culpa out of it.