BREAKING ALERT: The House just passed a discriminatory bill

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Today was a bad day for equal rights. If the House of Representatives gets its way, Iranian-Americans and others will be relegated to second-class citizens.

The House just passed by a disappointing vote of 407-19 the Visa Waiver Program Improvement Act of 2015 (H.R. 158), which could negatively impact the travel rights of certain groups including Iranian-Americans. The bill now moves into the Senate for deliberation and voting. We need to mobilize to stop this prejudicial bill in its tracks.

The AIC strongly opposes these unfair and prejudicial clauses and calls on our elected representatives to amend the bill in order to uphold the rights of all Americans, including Iranian-Americans.

The House’s legislation would bar dual nationals from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Syria, as well as people who have travelled to those countries in the past five years, from using the Visa Waiver Program, which allows citizens of 38 participating countries to travel to the U.S., Europe, Japan, and South Korea.

Because this bill discriminates on the basis of ethnicity and national origin, it is inconsistent with the equal protection clause in the U.S. Constitution.  Send a strong message to your elected representative in the US Senate. Add your name to our petition to show that you opposed these discriminatory measures. Together, we can stop this discriminatory bill from becoming a law and harming you and the ones you love.

Sincerely,

The American Iranian Council

 

Show the US Congress You Oppose This Discriminatory Bill!

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Kayvon Afshari

Kayvon Afshari managed the campaign to elect Hooshang Amirahmadi as President of Iran. In this role, he directed the campaign’s event planning, publicity, online social media, web analytics, and delivered speeches. Mr. Afshari has also been working at the CBS News foreign desk for over five years. He has coordinated coverage of Iran’s 2009 post-election demonstrations, the Arab Spring, the earthquake in Haiti, and many other stories of international significance. He holds a Master in International Relations from New York University’s Department of Politics, and graduated with distinction from McGill University in 2007 with a double major in political science and Middle Eastern studies. At NYU, his research focused on quantitative analysis and the Middle East with an emphasis on US-Iran relations. In his 2012 Master’s thesis, he devised a formula to predict whether Israel would launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, concluding that an overt strike would not materialize.