Kourosh Ziabari – Stimson Center: Emigration from Iran is on the rise again as more and more Iranians conclude that their country has been turned into scorched earth by the Islamic Republic and seek shelter, stability, and opportunity elsewhere.
While not as dramatic as the exodus from some other nearby countries such as Afghanistan or Syria, the human flight is a simmering societal cataclysm with long-term negative implications for Iran’s prosperity and national security.
Over the past four decades, waves of emigration have deprived Iran of its most talented youth, who instead have become engines of economic growth in Europe and North America. Nepotism, failure to reward merit, shrinking civil liberties, and a lack of vision for development have dovetailed with frequent cycles of political crisis, convincing thousands of Iranians that in order to pursue their dreams, they need to leave their homeland.
The ascent of the ultra-conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi as president in 2021 and the economic and social chaos resulting from his incompetence and excesses have fueled a new wave of emigration. In virtually every household, there is someone considering or in the process of moving overseas or who knows someone who is leaving. The exodus is not confined to political dissidents or others alienated by the status quo, but also includes establishment loyalists who fear for the future of their children.
In their rhetoric, the authorities paint a rosy picture of a country that has outwitted its many rivals, overcome a kaleidoscope of challenges, and is making headway daily. In January, 2023, President Raisi bragged that the United States had been “defeated” in its policy of maximum pressure against Iran, asserting that Iran had defied expectations with an “accelerated rate” of economic and scientific progress. But this sloganeering has failed to impress even regime stalwarts, who admit privately that the nation is hurtling toward economic, social, cultural, and foreign policy breakdown.
The unprecedented revolt that followed the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 and the government’s botched, violent response to the tectonic social change produced by the protest movement has accelerated the new tide of emigration. Among the initial measures implemented by the Raisi administration was to ratchet up restrictions on Internet connectivity and attempt to quash the lively Iranian presence on social media. That led many young Iranians, for whom social media provided a virtual escape, to reconsider remaining in a country where life seems so forlorn.
And as the security apparatus unleashed brute force to clamp down on the protesters who embraced the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, demand for migration went into high gear.
According to the Nilgam Center, a Tehran-based agency providing services to Iranians seeking to emigrate, between 2010 and 2020 roughly 500,000 migrants left the country permanently. The Stanford Iran 2040 Project, an academic platform dedicated to the study of Iran’s development, reported in April 2020 that the population of Iran-born emigrants increased from about half a million before the 1979 revolution to 3.1 million in 2019, with the United States, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom being their top destinations.
For many young Iranians aspiring to build better lives overseas, education abroad is the pathway. Currently, 130,000 Iranian-born students are believed to be enrolled in foreign universities, including 9,614 in American universities, making Iran the 13th most prevalent country of origin for foreign students in the U.S. The figure was even higher before the Trump administration imposed a so-called “Muslim ban” in 2017, and is remarkable given the absence of U.S.-Iran diplomatic ties, which obliges Iranians to travel to a third country to obtain visas.
Some Iranians are too desperate, or not sufficiently academically qualified, to patiently chart an educational escape and traverse the administrative complexities of getting admitted to top universities in high-income countries. Many embark on perilous journeys, including resorting to unsafe boats on turbulent seas.
As the British government cracks down on irregular immigration and constructs new legal obstacles to try to dissuade refugees from crossing the English Channel in small boats operated by human smugglers, Iranians will be affected disproportionately. In 2022, Iran was the third most common nationality of those seeking asylum in the United Kingdom, and more than 9,000 Iranians reached the shores of the U.K. on small boats and claimed asylum.
Elsewhere in Europe, asylum applications by Iranians are also growing exponentially. As reported by the European Union Agency for Asylum, in February 2023 alone 1,579 Iranians claimed refugee status in 27 EU countries. The 2022 overview shows 13,444 asylum applications were submitted by Iranian citizens in that year, of which 10,529 cases remain pending.
Iranians are so desperate to leave their country that they are also emigrating to nearby Arab countries, many of which have long-established diaspora communities. Iranians are reported to number 600,000 in the United Arab Emirates, one of the largest expatriate groups in a country where immigrants comprise nearly 90 percent of the population. Oman, which recently relaxed its visa regime, is also attracting more and more Iranians. The sultanate’s moderate, balanced statecraft is more appealing to migrants than Iran’s calcified theocracy.
The Islamic Republic’s aggressive foreign interventions, its attempts to debilitate social media, and its efforts to snuff out the last remnants of civil liberties are leading more Iranians to flee. This brain drain threatens Iran’s future prosperity, but the authorities are more focused on staying in power than on seeing Iran reach its potential as a modern, technologically.
This article was originally published in Stimson Center