NEW YORK If a debate, and the sentiments it subsequently evokes, can ever undo a nations character, the debate over the wall, the banning of immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations and the refusal to take in refugees, is doing so to the United States.

In recent weeks, the U.S., the promised land for the persecuted everywhere, has seen its Jewish cemeteries vandalized, brown-skinned immigrants assaulted and several mosques and Muslim establishments attacked. Refugees are being rejected by a public that hardly has any knowledge of who they are and what they bring to our communities.

Thirty years ago, I was one such refugee. I arrived in the U.S. just as Lady Liberty knows: Tired and poor, with only a backpack on my back and a few words of English in my lexicon. In me, the adolescent angst and anger stirred more than the average teenager, perhaps because of an ugly year in transit and an uprooting from my homeland Iran, to which, despite the bleakest of circumstances, I felt profoundly attached.

My affluent compatriots, whose extravagant lifestyles are the stuff of reality shows like the Shahs of Sunset, made up the first wave of arrivals in the tumultuous days before or immediately after the 1979 revolution. They fled, in great part, to bring their wealth to safety.

Choosing America, the Supreme Leaders arch enemy, was the greatest gamble of our lives.

For most of the rest of us, those who left long after the revolution, especially in the aftermath of several waves of arrests leading up to the 2009 Green Movement, the sale of everything we ever owned carried us only as far as a third country, an in-between location with a U.S. embassy. The one in Tehran had been shut down on November 4, 1979, in the aftermath of the ignominious hostage crisis. By the time travel costs, room and board and various legal and visa processing fees were paid for, we had used up the last of our scarce dollars.

Those of us who came to the U.S. in this second and third wave of immigration had already been intensely vetted by Tehran and we had failed the test. Under the clergys dogmatic reign, we had been relegated to the margins of society and fled to bring ourselves to safety.

Since 1979, the U.S. has attained a great deal more trust from Iranians, providing a refuge to those turned away by Tehran | Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters

The U.S. and much of the Western world have been engaged in an undeclared war with Iran for nearly 40 years. We, the post-revolutionary orders bonafide misfits gays, Jews, artists, Bahais, secular intellectuals and scientists, Iranian Sunnis, new converts to Christianity, Kurdish liberation activists, womens rights advocates, prisoners of conscience have been the real warriors. Choosing America, the Supreme Leaders arch enemy, was the greatest gamble of our lives.

It was comforting to discover that, contrary to all the propaganda we had once been subjected to, Americans did not bare their teeth or graze us with their claws (metaphors courtesy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, not mine). The America we experienced vast, open, free, and generous was not the America we had been told to fear. Our encounters with our new home stood in sharp contrast to the official narrative and opened another front in the undeclared war between Iran and America.

In the decades since 1979, diplomats and policymakers looked for ways to undo what residual distrust may have lingered among Iranians from the CIAs misadventures in 1953 and thereafter. Still, nothing has been as effective as the wistful narrative that the diaspora passed along to those still on the inside.

Indeed, in the past decade, every reporter who visited Iran returned with the same story: Iranians loved America. If the tired proverb absence makes the heart grow fonder ever needed foolproof evidence, the fond heart of Iranians in the absence of America since 1979 would be just that.

American industry and business institutions lost out to their European rivals when the ties between the U.S. and Iran were severed. However, the U.S. has since attained a great deal more in regaining the trust of Iranians and providing a refuge to those turned away by Tehran.

This new America is taking the very cruel shape the clerics had always portrayed: one of an unfeeling, morally corrupt bogeyman who cares for nothing other than lining his own pockets.

If such intangible claims are often hard to support, consider the Anti-Defamation Leagues 2015 survey, in which it found that Iran a nation under severe censorship and without any U.S. or Israeli presence was the least anti-Semitic in the Middle East and North Africa. We, the educated immigrants formerly branded as wretched refuse, can claim some credit for making that happen.

Now, this hard-earned seismic shift is about to be undermined with the savage stroke of a pen. The very messengers who were the catalysts of that historic shift, who gambled their all on America, are about to lose their cherished sanctuary.

Into the effigy of Uncle Sam raised up to the sky at Friday prayer, a terrible life has been breathed. This new America is taking the very cruel shape the clerics had always portrayed: one of an unfeeling, morally corrupt bogeyman who cares for nothing other than lining his own pockets. Lady Libertys light is dimming and so could the outline of hope for those who once followed it to these shores.

Roya Hakakian is the author of, most recently, Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove Press, 2011). She came to America as a refugee.

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Lady Liberty's dimming light - POLITICO.eu