Trump doesn’t know it, but Iranians are the Norwegians he’s been looking for

The White House wants to keep Iranians out of the United States. Special circumstances will allow entrance to a lucky few, but standard non-immigrant and immigrant admission, if current practices stand judicial challenge, will essentially be over. The Trump administration justifies this ban, which includes five other majority-Muslim countries, on national security grounds — an odd argument, since such a concern ought to incline the administration to give more visas, not fewer, to Iranians.

When I was in the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s and 1990s, and operating under consular cover, I may have given more visas to Iranians than any other U.S. official since the Islamic Revolution. The Iranian terrorist threat then was considerably greater than it is now. During those years, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the clerical major-domo and the guiding force of the Islamic republic abroad, approved an array of overseas operations that killed scores of Americans, Europeans, and Iranian exiles.

And yet Washington had no hesitation in giving tourist, student, and immigrant visas to Iranians who merited them. Since 1979, not a single terror attack inside the United States has been carried out by an Iranian or Iranian-American, although four expatriates have been convicted of terrorism-related crimes. Only one, a plot to blow up the Saudi ambassador at a Georgetown restaurant in 2011, had the clerical regime’s fingerprints on it.

Tehran still surveils its citizens abroad, runs lethal operations against Jews and Israelis, and has not (it appears) abandoned assassinating Iranian exiles outside of the United States. But the magnitude and competence of its terrorist operations beyond the Middle East have seriously declined. Given the theocracy’s terrorist track record, Iranians certainly represent far less of a security threat to Americans in the United States than either Saudi Arabians or Muslims from the European Union and Russia. Yet the administration is, for good reasons, not seeking to bar Saudi Arabians or European Muslims from entering the country.

In the Islamic republic, anti-Americanism is the creed from birth, but the clerical regime has found it increasingly difficult to effectively excoriate the United States, in part, because Iranians have come to loathe their rulers. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Nearly as important, the regime has had to deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iranians now live in the United States, and thousands from the Islamic republic had — until President Trump’s executive order — regularly visited their relatives, attended school, or just come to see the “Great Satan.”

The Internet and the rise of hand-held global communications devices, which the mullahs try to control, have further frustrated the regime’s anti-Western aspirations. Iranian Americans, Iranian green-card holders, Iranian students and visitors spread the truth in the old country. Like the Ireland of old, Iran is a nation of extended families: what a second cousin knows, everyone knows. The vibrant Iranian community in Los Angeles — with its own music, radio, Internet sites, and literary scene — is an alternate universe for Iranians back home, always inspiring and provoking.

Many Republicans, particularly those of the America First variety, have a hard time appreciating our country’s unrivaled soft power. The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lives in fear of it. The regime’s nonstop tirade against tahajom-e farhangi (“the cultural invasion”) and jormha-ye farhangi (“cultural crimes”) is a failing rearguard action against the seductive, liberating world that America has built since World War II. Most of the American right sees the West as playing defense, trying to protect occidental culture from its foreign and domestic enemies. Many American conservatives see a regnant Islam coming to our shores, threatening to do here what loose immigration policies have done to some European cities, where new communities hostile to the native culture have grown.

Let us disregard, for a moment, the question of whether Europeans can absorb these immigrants (though history suggests that they can). This certainly isn’t a problem for the United States, whose absorptive capacity dwarfs Europe’s. In 2016, according to the Department of Homeland Security, more than 1.1 million immigrants were granted permanent residence in the United States. Even if conservative Americans still fear a new, larger Muslim wave, Iranian immigrants, students, and tourists really shouldn’t accentuate their anxiety.

To borrow the president’s invidious language, Iranians are the “Norwegians” he’s been searching for. Those who have immigrated to the United States have had stunning success here, sterling exemplars of the American dream who enthusiastically embrace our secular, liberal society. The emphasis that Iranian families, even from peasant backgrounds, have placed on education has paid off handsomely in the West.

A sensible administration — one that realizes that the clerical dictatorship must fall before normality can return to U.S.-Iranian relations — would proudly advertise an open door to Persian curiosity about the United States. The mullahs dread America’s insidious appeal. Let’s give them more cause to do so. The administration so far hasn’t developed a soft-power approach to Tehran, using both open and clandestine means. It can partly correct this mistake by announcing that American consulates are again open to the citizens of the Islamic republic.