What if we naturalize an American basketball player and upon returning to USA for vacation, he will be question by US Immigration because he is carrying an Iranian Passport...






Iranian Arsalan Kazemi poised to make NCAA hoop history in '09
BY EBENEZER SAMUEL
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Saturday, November 15th 2008, 12:55 PM
The questions just kept coming, rapid-fire, like bullets from a machine gun. Eighteen-year-old Arsalan Kazemi was in a nervous sweat. He was running out of answers.
He was standing at an immigration desk near the main concourse at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport watching others file past.
He was surrounded by three uniformed officials. They wanted to know why this tall kid from Iran was trying to enter the United States, why in January. They wanted to know where his family was. They wanted to know if he was an Iranian soldier. They wanted to know everything.
This was no welcoming committee.
"I'm here to play basketball," he said. "I'm supposed to meet my coach."
They didn't believe him.
They brought him over to Anthony Ibrahim, the man Kazemi said was his coach, then walked him back to the desk. The interrogation was far from over. One official was gruff; another calm. Another kept calling Ibrahim, standing 30 yards away on his cell phone, to confirm Kazemi's answers.
They still didn't believe him. Kazemi had had enough.
"I'm not a terrorist," he snapped. "If you don't believe me, deport me."
It took six hours of questioning before Kazemi was allowed passage. He approached Ibrahim, alone and distraught.
"What I am trying to do," he told his coach, "will be very, very difficult."
Arsalan Kazemi came to the United States aiming to become the first Iranian-born athlete to play NCAA basketball. And even before that lengthy interrogation, he knew it wouldn't be easy.
His mission is two-pronged. The 6-7 Kazemi, who is now a senior at The Patterson School in North Carolina, seeks to cut a path from Iran to the college hardwood and contribute toward smoothing relations between two countries in the process.
Yes, he knows his country has been blacklisted by the U.S., labeled part of President Bush's "Axis of Evil," a collection of countries seeking weapons of mass destruction and promoting terrorism. And he knows of the Iranian students who stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran nearly 30 years ago and held 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days. And he knows of the decades of anti-Iranian sentiment that followed.
Before letting him board a plane bound for Houston in January, father Yousef and mother Roya warned their son not to tell anyone he was Iranian.
"They said it wasn't safe," he says.
He didn't listen. So, when a man at a North Carolina gas station asked him where he was from, Kazemi told the truth.
"The guy said, ‘I am going to kill you,'" Kazemi recalls. "Then he said he was joking. At first, I was scared. If you are me, wouldn't you be, too?"