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But according to a bluntly worded executive order from U.S. President Donald Trump, Nejatian’s Iranian birthplace now makes him “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

“This is virtue-signalling security theatre,” Nejatian told the National Post by phone from San Francisco.

On Friday, Trump issued an executive order that banned U.S. entry to nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia, for 90 days.

The suddenness of the ban meant that any nationals from the affected countries who were already airborne at the time of the order were detained upon landing.

Join Kash. We're hiring. We're going places. Also, we actually go places together as a team! https://t.co/ctxbKmdyyv —

Kaz Nejatian (@CanadaKaz) August 15, 2016

The order does not make exceptions for nationals with valid U.S. visas.

Nejatian — who helped form Canada’s own protocol for screening would-be terrorists — said the new order “almost certainly makes the U.S. less safe.”

For one thing, the ban is so blunt that it excludes foreign-born nationals regardless of their loyalty to the United States, he noted.

In a 2008 count of foreign-born U.S. military personnel, for instance, there were 97 Iranian-born U.S. service members and 13 from Syria.

A former Israeli minister of defence, Shaul Mofaz, is also threatened by the ban. Although Mofaz is an Israeli citizen, he was born in Tehran in 1948.