Iranian-born NSW Senator, Sam Dastyari, fears he and members of his family may be among those caught up by the Trump administration's freeze on visitors from seven Muslim nations, as confusion reigns around the world in the wake of the US order.
Senator Dastyari, who migrated to Australia at the age of five with his parents and older sister Azadeh, told Fairfax there was shock and sadness throughout the Iranian-Australian community at President Donald Trump's executive order, which slaps a temporary ban on Muslim migration and a 90 day halt on entry for people from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia.
The ban also applies to those with dual citizenship, the Wall Street Journal reports, which includes the great majority of Australia's 65,000 or so Iranian-born citizens.
Senator Dastyari said he had taken steps to divest himself of Iranian citizenship prior to his entering parliament, but the process was complex and expensive ( costing up to $20,000 employing lawyers in both countries) and most Iranians did not have the resources to undertake it.
Even when they had, he says, a question mark remains over how the Trump administration will judge a person trying to enter the US if their passport records Iran as their place of birth.
"It's so saddening that as an Australian senator, despite having taken every possible step to renounce my Iranian citizenship, I can not tell you with any certainty whether I would be allowed in the US today," Senator Dastyari told Fairfax Media.
"And there are whole bunch of Iranians, Syrians and others living in Australia right now who are Australian citizens, who are proud of being Australian, and yet have not gone through that incredibly expensive process to renounce their dual citizenship who are now being treated by America as second class citizens."
"At the end of the day the decision [to accept renunciation of Iranian citizenship} sits in the hands of a handful of clerics who hate so much what the Australian-Iranian community stands for, which is democracy, tolerance, freedom"
Senator Dastyari was born in the northern Iranian village of Sari, travelling here as a child with his family to escape the Iran-Iraq war.
On Sunday, standing with his proud and quietly spoken father Naser in the family shop in the basement of Sydney's Queen Victorian Building, the pair spoke of the sadness and anger that was permeating Muslim communities over the Trump administration's stand.
'We are shocked," Naser said. "I really feel pity for the American Iranians, and I'm sure they will show a big reaction to this."
Within his own family there were concerns that his nephew, now living in the US with an American Jewish wife, would not be able to come to Australia to visit an ailing father, who had recently had a stroke.
I can only imagine how much of recruitment tool this will be for those extremists who want nothing more than to divide us
Senator Sam Dastyari
"He has got a very good job in Silicon Valley, and now he can't come any more [to see his father] and my sister can't go to see him" Naser Dastyari said. "These are people who have not travelled to Iran at all in all these years, they have nothing to do with Iran but are stuck in the middle of this".
Senator Dastyari warned that the Trump administration's blunt order risked fuelling terrorism. "What hurts so much is that the people who had fled the exact same wars that America and Australia shed blood for, those people are being told they are no longer welcome, and the message goes beyond America and is [construed as] a message from the West. I can only imagine how much of a recruitment tool this must be for those extremists and terrorists who want nothing more than to divide us."
The head of the Australian-Iranian community organisation, Siamak Ghahreman, agreed saying that "terrorists will use this to recruit people because of the anger it will cause."
"I do understand that every country has the right to choose some rules and regulations but we are talking about people who have been living outside Iran for 10,20, 30 years now."
Mr Ghahreman said another difficulty for those seeking to divest themselves of dual Iranian nationality was the danger it could pose to relatives still in Iran.
Senator Dastyari has a sister, Azadeh, a one-time Fulbright scholar who studied at Harvard and has pursued an academic career in Australia. He said she was due to address a human rights conference in Connecticut in April but may not now be allowed to travel there to deliver her speech.
A former high-flyer, Senator Dastyari, 33, has kept a lower profile in recent months since stepping aside from the Labor front bench late last year over receiving payments from Chinese donors for travel expenses.