Forbes|Elizabeth MacBride: Kamran Elahian has seen some of this before. The Iranian-American entrepreneur and global philanthropist is watching the chaos around the new president’s tougher stance toward Iran, including new sanctions and a temporary ban on travel by Iranians to the United States.

In 1979, Elahian, then a young computer expert living in the United States, was stopped at the Boston airport by security guards after a trip to Europe for a NATO conference on computer networking.

“They said, 'Why did you take our people hostage?’ I said, ‘I didn’t take anybody hostage.’”

After questioning him for hours, the guards let him go. He went on to found a half-dozen companies during Silicon Valley’s first heyday, including Cirrus Logic, which went public and chip maker Centillium.
 Through decades of waxing and waning enmity between the governments of United States and Iran, there has been a steady pipeline of highly educated Iranians emigrating to the United States, many who have gone on to be entrepreneurs. For instance, there are thousands of Iranian students studying at universities now, according to a web site called the Iranian Americans Contributions project, a data mining site that works by identifying Iranian names.
Now, the question is whether that flow of talent will remain. Though there have been periods of tension before, this time around may be different because of the nature of the Trump presidency and the growing appeal of alternatives to the United States – places like Dubai, that are determined to become centers of innovation.

Last week, for instance, Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum quietly and possibly strategically announced a new visa program to lure top expats to the UAE (which has close ties to neighboring Iran). I asked the UAE’s Ministry of the Interior whether the new program was related to the U.S. president’s temporary visa restriction, but didn’t hear back by press time.

Among the Silicon Valley companies that might not exist without Iranian-American entrepreneurs and venture capitalists: eBay, founded by Pierre Omidyar, the son of Iranian immigrants; Shopzilla, founded by Farhad Mohit; many of the companies backed by Ali Partovi, one of the Silicon Valley’s best-connected angels, and Google itself. Omid Kordestani, the current executive chairman of Twitter, who was Google's 11th employee and its first business executive, responsible for all revenue and partnerships. Elahian said he has a list of 6,500 Iranian founders, CEOs and vice presidents.

If you wanted to create the worst possible environment to welcome entrepreneurs – who need legal predictability and rule of law to grow their businesses -- it could be unpredictability of the kind that has marked the first weeks of the Trump presidency. Elahian, for instance, is in the midst of helping bring students worldwide to the ACM-ICPC, a competition from which he said Google and Facebook often recruit. Two Iranian teams, totaling eight students, just canceled. It wasn’t only the temporary ban, Elahian said – it was the fact that they didn’t know whether the ban would be stayed, or return, or whether the broadening anti-immigrant backlash would make things worse.

“The United States has been the beacon,” said Elahian, whose recent work has focused on creating jobs through entrepreneurship in developing countries. “This whole flow of students who would be coming to U.S., all are going to be disappearing? It’s a huge thing. These all become the ambassadors of peace and cooperation.”
Meanwhile, the United States still leads the world with its innovative economy, but it is no longer unrivaled, as Silicon Valleys spring up in places like Singapore, Dubai and Paris. As the UAE’s move shows, many places are building on the lessons of America’s past success by focusing on infrastructure and talent. “We are living in a future where the pace of change is tremendous,” Saif Al Aleeli, CEO of the Dubai Future Foundation, told me in an interview a couple of months ago. “This is an economic war.”
All these moves, meanwhile, playing out in the public eye, tarnish America’s image as the place where innovators are most likely to succeed.

“I there is still a positive vibe and Iranian people have always had the utmost respect and interest towards American people, companies and brands,” said one young Iranian entrepreneur in an email. “There is a very large community of Iranians in the US (estimated at 1.5 million Iranians in the US). ... We like to stay together, and there is a great community of us in the US already.”

However, if this humiliating behavior remains and becomes a norm for years, I am sure the Iranian talent will find its way in another country. In the past week, I have heard multiple conversations between Iranian entrepreneurs and students in the US who were trying to convince each other to move together to Vancouver, Canada.”

The people of Silicon Valley know better than anyone how fragile the environment is that grows truly great ideas and companies.

On Sunday night, the Washington Post reported, 97 tech companies including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, Uber and many others filed a legal brief opposing the administration’s contentious entry ban.  according to people familiar with the matter. The move “demonstrates the depth of animosity toward the Trump ban.”