When I heard the news about Donald Trump’s #muslimban) one of the first things I did was ring my Iranian mum. ‘It’s an insult to me, as well as my family and my country,’ she told me, rightly furious. We have Iranian family who live in the US and I wondered what would happen to them. Would they be able to go and visit my family in Tehran, which they often do (it’s worth mentioning here that in Iranian culture family is the most important social institution, and people are extremely close to their extended relatives) and get back into the country where they’ve lived for many years? It seemed doubtful. And, as things stood last Saturday night, my mum, a proud dual British and Iranian national, was banned from entering the US.
Persecution is always bad of course – but it feels particularly insidious and terrifying when it’s you and your loved ones being persecuted. It’s a creeping cold wave of sickeness and anxiety that leaves you nervous in what were once mundane situations, such as getting on a plane. And, once it sets in it doesn’t leave you.
Last year, I was detained by US customs after flying into LAX. For anybody who has been lucky enough to never experience this, or any of the Twitter trolls out there who think this is all totally fine and I’m just being a ‘snowflake,' let me tell you what being interrogated in a US airport is really like.
Walking into the room, you’re randomly assigned a number. You’re not allowed to use your phone, so you have no way of contacting anybody you’ve travelled with or anybody waiting for you. You’re shouted at if you get up from your seat to stretch (who wants to sit down immediately after being on an 11-hour flight?). When you optimistically ask how long you’re going to be in this horrible room, you’re told everyone is seen on a ‘case by case’ basis and that it can be up to 48 hours. Bare in mind that all of this takes place without any food, water, or entertainment. They only call your name once, and pretty quietly, so you can’t read in case you miss your turn. If you need the toilet, you’re chaperoned to the bathroom by a guard. There’s no clock in there, so who knows how long you’ve been sat there listening to the cries and anguish of everybody around you. You notice that there’s only two white people in the room out of a couple of hundred. A guard has taken your passport, so you’re effectively left in limbo – stateless and dehumanised.
When you finally see a border guard, you have to recount your family history. You’re asked the same question over and over again, repackaged in a slightly different way. You feel like they are doing it on purpose, to get you frustrated and riled up. Then you second guess yourself; ‘am I just being paranoid or is this really happening?’ you wonder, realising that your identity means something very different in this room to what it meant as you boarded the flight.
I was one of the lucky ones – two hours later I was free to go and enjoy my California holiday. But, as a result of my experience, I have an understanding of what the people currently stuck in that room at LAX, and in airports across the US, are going through. Sadly, I’m almost certain that they’re being treated a lot worse at the moment than I was. For one, I didn’t have my social media accounts scrutinised to see if I supported the President or not.
Yes, what I experienced happened before Donald Trump came into power, due to Obama’s visa waiver law. But don’t tell me that what is going on at the moment isn’t an all-out, racist attack from Trump. Obama’s law – which I also disagreed with – only suspended visa-free travel for people who had been to one of the seven designated countries since 2011 (the last time I’d visited Iran was 2010 so my ESTA was valid, however it seems border guards like to make up their own rules).
Trump’s order, however, blocks visas altogether for citizens of those seven affected countries. People from, or holders of dual nationality from places on the list are being detained for long hours – days in fact. This includes young children, elderly people in wheelchairs and others left without necessary medication for their chronic illnesses, people are risking being deported to countries they’ve not even lived in before, families are being separated and stopped from seeing each other. Try and watch this without crying, I couldn’t.
I wanted to find out what it was like for the people being affected by the executive order in the US. I spoke to a married couple in their 20s who live in Chicago, Rick and Samanéh. Samanéh was born in Iran but moved to the US when she was 13 with her family. At present, her parents are in Iran visiting relatives and though they are scheduled to return next week, they are unsure that they'll be able to return, despite the fact that they are both green card holders (who the White House has tentatively said may be exempt from the ban). 'The uncertainty is the worst thing, and knowing that if my parents can land back in the US they will be subjected to intense questioning and potential harassment,' Samanéh says.
As a green card holder herself, Samanéh is also potentially trapped in America at present. 'I've consulted lawyers who have advised me not to make travel plans in case I won't be allowed back in - I was supposed to be going to Germany for work, then Rick and I were going to visit my family in Iran, but we've had to cancel it. Our dream was to have a life in both countries, Iran and the US, but that's been taken away from us.'
After Rick posted a
about his wife's family situation on Facebook it went viral. But, with it, came negative comments. 'I had people ask me if I love this country so much, why am I not a full citizen?' Samanéh says. She explains to me that 'it is a very complicated and lengthy procedure, you have to wait years, it's an 8-9 year process and during this time you have a green card you're paying taxes but you can't benefit from federal funding. For example, I went to university in the US but my parents had to pay out of their own pocket.'
It’s all too easy for people who are unaffected, and never will know what it feels like to be hauled aside in immigration when you have done nothing wrong, to turn around and say ‘the ban is only going to be in place for 90 days, get over it.’ Get real –this is the just the start, and unless we collectively challenge what I believe amounts to outright fascism (see thisdefinition if you still aren’t convinced) things are only going to get a lot worse.
Putting aside the fact that three months is a long time to live with uncertainty when you’ve done nothing wrong apart from being born in a certain place due to sheer luck of the life lottery, do you really believe this order is not going to be extended? The ban on Syrian refugees is already indefinite.
Worst of all, this came as a sudden shock for a lot of people. Though they knew Trump had talked about banning Muslims from entering the US, Rick and Samanéh, like a lot of other people, believed this meant new arrivals to the US, not people currently living there, or those with dual nationality. 'It is xenophobic and malicious,' the couple tell me. 'We had no knowledge this was going to happen when it did. There were rumours a couple of days before but even people working with Trump didn't realise he was going to sign that executive order until he did it.'
There’s no real reason for Trump to have signed this executive order, despite all his tweeting about ‘keeping bad ‘dudes’ with bad intentions out of the country’. From 1975 – 2015, the most up to date statistics, people from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (the seven listed countries) have killed 0 Americans in terrorist attacks on US soil. Compare this to Saudi Arabia for example, an exempt Muslim-majority country where Trump has business interests – 15. Trump has gone for a ‘pick and choose’ approach on the ban, and though you can look at this as a way to appease his followers but protect his own businesses, it’s been argued this is a way for Trump to justify his awful lawsby laying the blame for discrimination at Obama’s door.
Iran has, inevitably, retaliated. The country has banned US citizens from visiting the country,which in turn causes more uncertainty for many people who live and work there. Of course, Twitter trolls came out in force slagging off Iran, saying ‘why would anybody want to visit there?’ and so on. I made the mistake of calling one of them ignorant, and quickly my mentions filled up with Trump supporters telling me to ‘go back home’ (classic), that I was an ‘illegal Persian residing in London’ (my favorite comment tbh) and an ‘Islamist-fascist apologiser’, among other things. I tried to shake it off, responding with sarcasm (it turns out calling people an expert on a topic they know nothing about will get you blocked) but being on the receiving end of that kind of relentless racist abuse was disgusting.
However, what has heartened me and given me hope is that for every alt-right (OK, I’m going to go all out here and say that I think we should really be saying fascist, which is what journalists should be doing, but, mostly, aren’t) idiot out there, there’s dozens of people who are rightly against what is currently happening in the USA. It looks like rather than causing the division he wants to, Trump has brought a lot of people together. I hope the protests continue, and outside of the US as well.
There’s a lot of criticism from people asking why we should care about US politics, or saying that Trump was democratically elected and we should just give him a chance. The recent Daily Mail editorialsays as much, thought I wouldn’t expect anything less from a paper that has helped demonise immigrants and fan the flames of Islamophobia. According to them, I should calm down and that it’s not a racist measure. Given that my relatives and I feel discriminated against by this ban due to our ethnic background, I’d say it’s pretty racist. But then again, I guess the writer behind the piece is the expert on what’s racist or not here. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche said to the editor of the American Spectator after the US election ‘I am sorry, but if you are a white man you don’t get to define what racism is…you don’t get to sit there and say that he hasn’t been racist when objectively. It’s not about your opinion. Racism is an objective reality and Donald Trump has inhabited that reality.’
Many people think it’s enough that British citizens with dual nationality from the seven countries are exempt from the ban. It’s nowhere near enough – it’s basic humanity and compassion to think about the non-British people affected. Also, I believe if my mum flew to the US tomorrow, at the very least she’d spent a long time in that immigration room. The US Embassy seem to confirm my suspicions, telling people of who are nationals or hold dual nationality of the seven countries not to apply for an American visa only a couple of days ago.
Theresa May seems more bothered about protecting the ‘special relationship’ and making trade deals post-Brexit than she does about standing up to rampant racism. Although, I can’t say I’m surprised. Let’s not forget she signed off on the Home Office racism ‘go home’ vans and led a crackdown on international student visas. Standing up for people who are on the receiving end of a horrific, racist policy just isn’t in her interests. I’m expecting nothing from her, I only hope history will judge her unkindly.
So what can we personally do about this ban when our own Prime Minister is set on appeasement? Keep demonstrating. Call out racism when you see it, whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook or on the streets. Sign petitions. Donate to ALCU who have launched a lawsuit against the ban, and CAIR, a US Muslim civil liberties organisation. Write to your MPs asking them to put pressure on Theresa May to cancel Trump’s upcoming state visit. And above all, educate yourself and others about the culture and daily life of people who are from the seven countries affected by the ban if you don’t know anything or you’re going on lazy stereotypes– you’d be surprised.
Rick agrees. 'It's important to take time to expose yourself to people who are different from you,' he says. 'Voices who can understand humanity, and don't view people as "others" now have a chance to turn the tide away from the rise of the far-right. There are so many parallels between now and Germany in the 1930s. It all started with a restriction of movement of people and isolationist politics. It is very frightening.'
Like this? Then you might be interested in...
How Donald Trump Is Already Damaging Women's Rights Around The World
Stop Trying To Give Melania Trump A Story Just Because She Won't Tell One
Follow Natasha on Twitter @tash_wynarczyk
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.