Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Staiert told a group of new U.S. citizens Wednesday there’s a reason she feels such a bond with them when she attends naturalization ceremonies.

‘My father and mother met on a U.S. campus. My father’s Iranian, my mother’s American,” she said. “When we were very young we went over to Iran for a few years and came back right before my fifth birthday. My father didn’t come back with us.”

Staiert informed 79 immigrants from 33 countries, from Australia to Mexico to Zambia, that she and her two siblings and her mother eventually settled in Wyoming.

“As you can imagine, because of the relations between Iran and the U.S., it was a kind of a hard place to be from when we were growing up,” she told the attentive crowd. “When I was in middle school we had the hostage crisis. When I was in college there was Iran-Contra.”

Another Secretary of State staffer, elections director Judd Choate, also has  a unique story to tell when he attends naturalization ceremonies in Colorado on behalf of the office. Choate’s daughter Jackie was born in China, and went through the ceremony when she was 3½.

“I recited the words that you all have said on her behalf,” Choate said told new Americans  in April.

As for Staiert, her  father returned to the United States now and then but wasn’t around much. Still, Staiert said, the family turned out well. She became an attorney and is deputy secretary of state. One brother is a general in the Air Force. The other prosecutes child-abuse cases in Casper, Wyo.

She said have people have asked why they seemed to blossom despite the hardships.

“I think it’s because we never resented some of the comments we would receive or some of the discrimination we would feel,” she said. “I think it made us feel like we had that much more of a duty to prove that we were as much a citizen as anybody else.”

That duty, she said, extended to their commitment to education, to volunteering in their communities, to be good neighbors and to stay informed.

“When I come to these ceremonies, I feel such a bond with the people who are here because I know that all of you come into it with that sense of pride and that sense of duty toward country that maybe other people take for granted.”

Staiert encouraged the new citizens to register to vote and to participate in elections.

“Thank you all for letting me experience this with you today,” she said. “Congratulations to all of you. You are now citizens of the greatest country that you could be citizens of.”

To read more posts by Lynn Bartels, visit her official blog at the Colorado Secretary of State website.