The Guardian| Roya Hakakian: Of all the interventions the United States has attempted in the last decade to contain Iran, one of the most successful is perhaps the least known of them all.

It came in 2012, when Barack Obama�s state department began easing restrictions on student visas for Iranians. By 2015, half of all visas issued to citizens of the seven countries affected by Trump�s travel ban went to Iranian nationals, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in tuition fees for US academic centers. Iran�s top academic and artistic talents flocked to America, in numbers unprecedented since 1979.

It is this quiet victory that Donald Trump�s executive order threatens to undo.

One of the thousands of students who came here is the Iranian artist Shahrzad Changalvaee, who began in the master�s of fine arts program at Yale University in 2013. Three years later, she found herself captivated by the presidential campaign and joined demonstrations in support of Hilary Clinton. On 20 January this year, Changalvaee, returning to the US from a trip abroad, found a different America than the one she knew.

Had her plane landed a few days later, she, like hundreds of other Iranian students, would have been turned away at the airport thanks to the president�s travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries.

That this US election did not go as she had hoped was a greater blow to her than most others on campus. It brought back memories of another lost campaign.

Shahrzad and her husband, Iman Raad, a formidable figure on Iran�s graphic art scene, had invested much in the reformist presidential candidate, Mohammad Moussavi who challenged the hardliner incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in the disputed 2009 election. Moussavi�s defeat prompted massive street protests, but the brutal crackdown that followed snuffed out the opposition green movement and its hopes for peaceful change.

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