Nowruz is the Persian New Year, an ancient secular celebration of the spring equinox, and has traditionally been a time when people travel between Iran and the United States to see family.
Los Angeles has tens of thousands of Iranian residents, the largest population outside of Iran, and many of them have been here since the late 1970s, or were born here. The 1979 religion in Iran put a fundamentalist religious government into power, and a lot of people fled for that reason. But they still have family and lives back in Iran, and many planned to move back if the regime ever became more moderate. This is why Iranians and Iranian-Americans travel, sometimes yearly, between the two countries.
But the recent travel bans have put many of those plans on hold. Hundreds of people have had to cancel their flights because their visas were revoked. ATT Vacation, a travel agency in Los Angeles, has refunded $100,000 to Iranian-Americans who didn’t feel comfortable leaving the country with the ban in effect, even though the flights themselves were nonrefundable.
When the first travel ban was halted by federal courts, some people grew more confident, but with news of another travel ban incoming, many decided to just stay put despite the fact that the second ban is also being challenged by federal courts.
For many Iranian-Americans, the United States is the only home they’ve known. But as stories keep cropping up of American citizens being denied reentry into the country because border agents didn’t believe they were Americans, or of people coming from countries not affected by the ban being held for similar reasons, it’s understandable that many Iranian-Americans are leery of flying.
There has been much discussion of how these travel bans are negatively impacting tourism to the United States, but there needs to be more discussion about how Americans are being harmed by these bans as well.
“This is so sad, it’s just crazy,” said Iranian-American grocer Minoo Yousefi, who has been in the U.S. for 35 years and has helped her mother, who is in her 90s, travel to LA several times. “We don’t know what we will do. My mother is old. She is going to pass away soon. My daughter may not be able to see her again, and that would kill her. This is supposed to be a time of celebration, but I am so anxious.”