As the U.S. continues to pursue its war with Iran, it is useful to consider the impacts to Iranian Americans and Iranians studying in our universities. As with so many other forms of prejudice, ugliness and discrimination are problems we must acknowledge and decry.
Here in Oregon as elsewhere, anti-Persian conduct reaches back nearly 50 years to 1979, when militant Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage. Within weeks of that incident, President Jimmy Carter ordered federal immigration agents to come to Portland State University to interview 155 Iranian students.
The scrutiny and resultant attacks broadened to others of Middle East heritage, such as Qatari and Arab students. A Qatari student had a bullet fired through his car window, for instance. Three Arab students were beaten at Cleveland High School and one of them, a Kuwaiti, said classmates chanted at him, “Go home, Iranian, go home.” A PSU graduate reported being punched by a driver who asked whether he was “a damn Iranian”.
In Portland at that time, anyone who looked Iranian became a target of enmity.
Twenty years later, a Portland State professor, Kazem Tehrani, told the Oregonian that “there are certain times that we are very nice and very good people,” he said of how Americans regarded him and other Iranians. “And other times when we are ‘terrorists’.”
Global events ever since have meant that fear and persecution have continued. Each crisis in the Middle East, especially between the U.S. and Iran, has led to incidents in public schools, medical institutions, and elsewhere.
By 2001, Iranian Oregonians again became targets. Portland’s police chief met with 100 Iranians and Iranian Americans at PSU and promised that a detective would follow up on every reported bias incident. This would come as a relief to an immigration attorney by the name of David Shomloo, who had experienced young men shouting at him at a Beaverton intersection. He asked when describing that encounter, “why do I have to answer for the wrong deeds of these horrible people?”
Other incidents follow a similar pattern. In 2017, Multnomah County deputies found anti-Muslim graffiti at the Troutdale home of an Iranian American man, along with a note threatening to shoot him. The man was not even Muslim, but Baha’i. In 2018, a patient at Oregon Health and Science University refused an appointment with her Iranian American doctor. The patient aske for a white, American-born physician instead, and the clinic complied. This incident, reported by surgeon Rahel Nardos, was the subject of Oregonian coverage of the incident. Dr. Nardos wrote that her staff had no guidance on when and how to draw the line on such conduct.
Just as other groups have contended with discrimination in its various forms, so too are our Middle Eastern guests, refugees, students, and transplants. Oregon already prohibits national-origin discrimination in employment, as does the federal government under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. These laws do not, however, protect people in other contexts.
In 2025, two Iranian-American state legislators stepped forward with a bill to celebrate the Iranian New Year, Nowruz. Representatives Farrah Chaichi (D-Beaverton) and Cyrus Javadi (then R-Tillamook) sponsored House Bill 3768, designating March 21 as Nowruz Day. This bipartisan legislation passed unanimously in the House and by 22-6 in the Senate. Governor Kotek signed it into law.
Now, Oregon should step from celebration to protection of Middle Easterners in our state agencies, universities, school districts, hospitals, and local governments. They could do this through a concurrent resolution that has no fiscal impact. Such a resolution could affirm that national origin, heritage, and family ties abroad are not, by themselves, grounds for suspicion, reassignment, or exclusion. It could encourage public employers to give staff a written procedure for addressing national-origin protests by parents, patients, or the public.
Such a resolution need not interfere in an employer’s review of legitimate employee conduct or eligibility for a sensitive position. It need not take a position on American foreign policy – after all, Iranian Oregonians disagree about such topics among themselves. The measure would not target any single institution, create a new cause of legal action, or impose a mandate on any public body.
As an educator, I believe that we make gains in our communities when we educate, and this resolution would take a step toward building awareness while also ensuring that Oregon’s public bodies enact safeguards that make sense to protect against workplace discrimination.