In two days this past January, my government murdered forty thousand of its own people.
They did it in the dark, on purpose. First they cut the internet to the entire country, all ninety-two million people, so there would be no cameras, no phone calls, no witnesses, no one left to count. Then they opened fire. On protesters with bare hands. On children. Forty thousand human beings erased in forty-eight hours, while the rest of the world was looking at something else.
I am Iranian. I despise that regime with everything in me. And here is the part I still cannot make my mind accept: I am being punished for it, here, in the United States, the country I came to and trusted, because of that same regime. Not by it. By America. Because I carry the same passport as the men who pulled the triggers, and to the system deciding my life, that apparently makes me one of them.
Let me show you what that punishment actually looks like. It’s quieter than a massacre. But it has a cruelty all its own.
I have a piece of paper from the United States government that says, in its own words, that I am in the national interest.
That’s not me bragging. It’s the literal finding. I applied for a green card under EB-2 NIW, the National Interest Waiver, a category this country built specifically for people whose work matters enough to skip the usual hoops. USCIS reviewed my case and approved the first prong: yes, your work has substantial merit and national importance. They wrote it down. By the government’s own assessment, keeping me here serves America.
Then they sent me a Request for Evidence on the rest, and after I answered it, they simply stopped. No decision. No timeline. Nothing. And here’s the detail that still makes my hands shake: I paid roughly ten thousand dollars for this process, twenty-eight hundred of it for premium processing, the fee you pay so the government legally promises to decide your case fast. They took the money. Then they froze the case anyway.
Ten thousand dollars. I’m a PhD student. I don’t have parents who can wire me money, I’ll get to why in a minute. The only reason I could pay at all is that I was lucky enough to land an industry internship, and I handed the entire check straight to the US government. For a maybe. For a frozen maybe.
You want to know the recourse? Sue. File a lawsuit against the federal government to force it to do the job I already paid it to do, with a lawyer, for god knows how many more thousands I don’t have. All of it, the ten grand, the lawsuit I can’t afford, the years of my life, for what? A work permit. The right to do a job and pay taxes. That is the entire prize at the end of this. I lie awake and I cannot make the math of it mean anything.
And it is not just my green card. Understand this clearly, because it is the part that gets softened into a word like “delay” until it sounds almost reasonable. Since December, the United States has placed an indefinite hold on essentially every immigration benefit for people from my country. Not slowed. Not backlogged. Stopped. OPT, the work authorization a graduate needs just to use the degree they earned here, frozen. H-1B, the main work visa in the entire country, frozen. O-1, the visa built for people of extraordinary ability, frozen. All of it, halted in December, with no end date, no timeline, no promise it ever turns back on. And when they finally restarted the machine for most countries this spring, they reached over and left the switch off for mine.
People hear “pause” and picture a slow line at the DMV. So let me say exactly what it is. It is not a delay. It is a halt. A wall with no door in it.
It means I could be offered a faculty position at MIT tomorrow and it would change nothing.
It means a frontier AI lab could push a seven-figure offer across the table and it would change nothing.
It means I can do every single thing right, clear every bar they set, win every prize they claim to value, and still have no legal way to turn any of it into the right to work in this country. And the cruelty is in the form of it. A denial would at least be an answer, something with edges, something you could fight. This has none. It just sits there, suspended in the air, indefinitely, while my visa clock keeps ticking and there is no date on any calendar and no human being to call. “Frozen” with the clock still running is not mercy. It is “no” wearing a costume, so that nobody in that building ever has to sign their name to what they did to me.
And I’m one of the lucky ones, because at least my green-card prong got approved. Other Iranians around me are getting demands to prove they won’t become a public charge, to document that they won’t end up a drain on the state. Imagine the smallness of being ordered to prove you won’t be garbage.
So let’s actually check that, since the government won’t bother to. Iranian-Americans have a median household income around $97,000, against a national median in the $70,000s, and nearly half of our households clear $100,000 a year [1]. More than one in four of us holds a master’s or a doctorate, the highest rate of any of the sixty-seven ethnic groups anyone has studied [1]. By every measure that exists, we are one of the most educated, highest-earning communities in the entire country [2]. Public charge? We are the opposite of a public charge. We are the people quietly funding the public schools your kids sit in.
And the “threat”? Go look it up. The number of Americans ever killed on US soil in a terrorist attack by an Iranian is zero. Not “low.” Not “acceptable risk.” Zero. We have never once, not a single time, done the thing this entire machine claims to be protecting the country from.
So if we are not a burden, and we are not a threat, I would give anything for someone to just say out loud what this is actually about.
Look at how we actually live here.
The Chinese and Indian communities in this country are enormous and brilliant, they’ve built whole sections of American technology and medicine and science, and they have my full respect. We’re smaller and quieter, and the thing that breaks my heart about my own people is how completely we fold ourselves into this place. We learn the language like we were born speaking it. We love the music, the movies, the culture, half of us have tastes more Western than the Americans sitting next to us. You will never find Iranians organizing as a bloc to push our way onto anybody. We don’t demand the country bend to us. We don’t proselytize. We don’t enforce our beliefs on a single living soul. It simply isn’t in us.
What we hold onto is Persian, and Persian is not the regime, and it is not Islam. Our traditions are thousands of years older than the men who hijacked our country: Nowruz, the poetry, the food, leaping over fire to welcome the spring. We keep all of it gently, privately, among ourselves, and otherwise we show up as Western as a human being can be. We ask for nothing except to be left alone to work and to live.
And this is how we get treated.
Here’s why my parents can’t just send the ten grand. This is the part people outside Iran never understand: it wasn’t one bad week. Iran’s inflation has run at roughly 40 percent a year, for years, around 43 percent in 2021, about 44 percent in 2022 and again in 2023, climbing back toward 45 to 50 percent by 2025 [3]. Over the last five years, prices rose cumulatively by more than 400 percent. That’s not a statistic when it’s your family, it’s watching the value of everything your parents spent their lives building quietly evaporate, year after year, until in late December the currency finally cracked in half and what little was left turned to confetti overnight. That slow strangling is the same thing that finally drove people into the streets.
And even if my family had the money, they couldn’t get it to me, sanctions make moving money out of Iran impossible. That door is welded shut by my own government. The other door, staying here, working here legally, I just walked you through. Welded shut by this one.
So I live in the gap between two governments. Locked out of the country I come from, frozen out of the country I came to. No money in. No status out. Suspended in the half-inch of air between them, holding my breath, for years.
Let me tell you about the country I come from. Briefly, because the full version is a book I’m not strong enough to write yet.
In late December, people who had just watched the last of their savings vanish walked into the streets with bare hands, against a state that has spent forty years perfecting the murder of its own children. You already know what happened next, because I opened with it. What I didn’t tell you is what it felt like from here.
I tried to call my family during the blackout. The line didn’t ring. Not busy, dead. A flat, endless nothing where my whole family used to be. At first it was total: no calls, no internet, no way to reach in or out. Just weeks of pure silence, you sitting in a grad-student apartment in America at three in the morning refreshing a phone that will not connect, while your country is being killed in the dark, not knowing if the people who raised you are still breathing.
Then, after a few weeks, the lines opened a crack, but only one way. Calls could come in, from them to me, never the other direction. So my entire life shrank down to waiting by the phone for a call I could not make and could not return. If I was asleep when it came, if I was in the shower, if I stepped outside for ten minutes, it was gone, and there was no way on earth to reach back through the dark and ask them to try again. Still no internet. Just me, and a phone, and the hope that the next time it lit up it would be them, still alive.
And the silence held. That’s the part that hollows me out. A massacre on the scale of the worst chapters in any history book happened four months ago, and most of the planet has no idea it occurred. Stop a hundred Americans on the street and ninety-five couldn’t tell you it happened. Even the smartest machines we’ve built, the ones that supposedly know everything, didn’t grasp the scale of it until you sat them down and forced them to look. That is how total the dark was. They didn’t just murder forty thousand people. They erased them from the world’s memory in real time, while it was still happening.
Maybe in about fifty years they’ll make beautiful, devastating, oscar-winning movies about this. People will sit in dark theaters and weep and turn to each other and ask how the world could have let it happen. And the honest answer will be: the world didn’t even know. It was looking at something else. The lights were off on purpose.
So when I look at the people around me, and I swear I don’t resent a single one of them, I notice that almost all of them started at zero, and I started somewhere far below it. It was never about a number. It’s about a floor. The person who starts at zero has one beneath them: parents who can wire money in a crisis, a passport that opens doors, an embassy that picks up the phone, a country to fly home to if it all falls apart. When something goes wrong for them, there is something there to catch them.
I have none of that. When something goes wrong for me, there is nothing below. Nothing. So if we ever land in the same place, please understand that we did not run the same race, and most of the room can’t even see the stretch of track I had to claw my way up just to reach the line everyone else was handed at birth.
Marco Rubio likes to say it into the cameras: the Iranian people are different from their government[4]. He says it a lot. And then his government certifies me as a national interest, takes my ten thousand dollars, freezes my life, and treats me as indistinguishable from the men who cut the lights and opened fire on children.
So which is it. Because from down here, below zero, alone, locked out by the country I fled and frozen by the country I trusted, the two of you look like you’re working together just fine.
So sad. So fucking sad. I feel sorry for people like me stuck in this limbo, I really do. And I feel even sorrier for the ones still stuck back there, the brilliant, gentle, extraordinary people who never got the chance to make it out. Who are every bit as smart as me. Who are just gone, in the dark, uncounted.
So fucking sad.
References
[1] Iranian-American income and education statistics, https://theworlddata.com/iranian-in-us-statistics/
[2] Iranian immigrants in the United States (Migration Policy Institute), https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/iranian-immigrants-united-states-2021
[3] Iran inflation rates, https://www.worlddata.info/asia/iran/inflation-rates.php
[4] U.S. Department of State, https://x.com/StateDept/status/2051765742027030780?s=20