During the 1979 hostage crisis, Iranians in the U.S. lived in fear of deportation
The political and cultural moods were staunchly anti-Iranian; they weren’t welcome, but they couldn’t leave
“Just don’t talk about it,” Harvard professor Richard N. Frye advised his students in 1980. “Don’t advertise the fact that you are Iranian. You might be beaten.” In November of the previous year, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime had seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 American citizens and diplomats hostage. In the subsequent months, with the conflict unresolved, anti-Iranian sentiment in America had reached a fever pitch. Iranians living in the U.S. — many of them students — suddenly found themselves in a precarious situation.
The Iranians’ fear of deportation would be familiar to many immigrant communities seen as a “threat to national security.” Their adopted country was becoming increasingly hostile toward them, but returning to post-revolution, Khomeini-ruled Iran was too risky an option. There was nothing to do but watch the news and wait.
President Jimmy Carter was under extreme pressure to resolve the situation. He tried to reassure the American public in spring 1980: “I am committed to resolving this crisis. I am committed to the safe return of the American hostages and to the preservation of our national honor.” But what happened next would transform the daily lives of U.S.-based Iranians.
On April 7, more than five months after the beginning of the crisis, President Carter announced that he was breaking diplomatic ties with Iran. Effective immediately, sanctions would prohibit exports to Iran, and Iranian assets would be frozen. Carter, who enjoyed a reputation as a humanitarian, declared all U.S. visas issued to Iranian citizens invalid, with the exception of “proven humanitarian reasons or where the national interest of our own country requires. This directive will be interpreted very strictly.”
The very next day, several Iranians were stopped trying to board U.S.-bound planes in London. A few days later, a group of students was detained at the U.S.-Canada border, on their way back to Michigan. The episode was fictionalized in Parviz Sayyād’s 1987 movie Checkpoint.
Carter’s decision plunged vast swaths of Iranians into limbo. An estimated 150,000 Iranians held American visas at the time. Most of them were already in the United States, and therefore weren’t at risk of immediate deportation. “Once in the good old United States legally, or illegally for the matter, they are cloaked in the mantle of the constitutional and legal protections we all value,” the White House press secretary, Jody Powell, said. But as the case of the Michigan students showed, Iranian visa holders who left the country were rolling the dice. They were, essentially, trapped in the U.S., worried that visa and travel rules could change at any time.
For students the situation was particularly delicate. In 1979 and 1980, no other country sent as many foreign students to U.S. universities as Iran. Of the estimated 150,000 Iranian U.S.-visa holders, more than 56,700 were students. The sanctions against them were especially harsh. Immediately after the seizure of the embassy, Carter ordered all Iranians with student visas to register with U.S. immigration officials or face deportation. A federal judge initially ruled the order unconstitutional, but that decision was reversed on appeal. Meanwhile, the Immigration and Naturalization Service prepared to slog through thousands of compliance interviews. In barely two months, 54,486 Iranians had been interviewed, 45,678 of whom were found to be in compliance with their visas. Roughly 90 percent of those interviewed were effectively students.
The backlash to the hostage crisis had serious consequences for the everyday lives of young Iranians. Universities all across the country became inhospitable and even hostile to the Iranian students and academics. For some students, walking on the campus was like running the gauntlet. As Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, remembers, there were undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania chanting, “Nuke Iran, maim Iranians!” Many Iranian students tried to hide their nationality in order to avoid being mistreated on campus, referring to themselves as Persians as a way to distance themselves from the Khomeini regime, while enduring puerile taunts such as “Ayatollah ss-a-hole-ah.” About half of the Iranians studying at MIT and Harvard signed an open letter to protest Carter’s “selective harassment.” They said the U.S. deportation proceedings represented “a classic case of bending the legal system to suit the prevailing political mood of the day.”
The tension reached new heights on April 24, 1980, when the United States Armed Forces, under the auspices of Operation Eagle Claw, attempted to rescue the hostages. Eight U.S. soldiers and one Iranian civilian died, and no hostages were retrieved. After the failed rescue, Carter’s hands were tied. Further sanctions posed a potential humanitarian crisis, because of possible persecution by the Iranian government against Jews, Bahá’ís, Christians, and other minorities.
The Iranian hostage crisis lasted for 444 days and was finally resolved on January 20, 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day. During his entire campaign, Reagan harped on Carter’s inability to handle the crisis. Once all 52 hostages had been released, Reagan could enter the White House as a hero and claim the victory as his, even though it was Carter who had done the legwork. Carter’s administration had negotiated the Algiers Accords, which enabled the release of the hostages by unfreezing $7.9 billion of Iranian assets, granting Iran immunity from lawsuits and pledging that the U.S. wouldn’t intervene politically or militarily in Iran’s internal affairs.
Both administrations had found almost 7,000 Iranian students to be in violation of their visas, and some 430 of them were deported. But the end of the crisis didn’t mend the psychic toll on U.S.-based Iranians, who lived in a country where they were perceived as the enemy and forced to live in a state of uncertainty. As Shahrokh Rouhani, a grad student at the time, put it: “The nation in general was completely galvanized against Iranians and the Iranian regime.”
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