Iranian Emigration

Persian Square, Los Angeles

Iranian emigration is the process whereby people from Iran or Persia on the gateway between the Middle East and Central Asia have left their country and settled in other parts of the world in modern times. Iranian migration has been driven by a range of different factors and events. For instance, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 led to the movement of the considerable Jewish minority in the country out of Iran. The Iranian Revolution of 1978–9 was a much bigger event that led many secular Muslims and other groups to begin leaving. This flight of more liberal-minded Iranians from their country has continued over time. These Iranian migrants have laid down roots in many different countries and places. For instance, such is the number of Iranian migrants living in the Westwood region of Los Angeles in California today that it has become known as Tehrangeles, a portmanteau of Tehran and Los Angeles.

Iranian emigration chronology of eventsIranian emigration chronology of events

For much of modern history migration from Iran was relatively limited. Under the Pahlavi Dynasty of the Shahs that ruled Iran from 1925 to 1979 there was limited permanent emigration from Iran, although the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 did see the country’s approximately 150,000 Jewish people begin to migrate quite quickly to the Levant, a process which was completed by the 1980s. Iran’s Jewish community is virtually non-existent today owing to migration. Another kind of transient Iranian migration during the era of the Shahs was the movement of Iranian students abroad to study in western universities. By the 1970s, on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, Iranians were one of the largest non-western groups studying in universities in the United States, Britain and other countries.

The Iranian Revolution of 1978–9

The Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s, the flight of the Shah from Iran early in 1979, and the establishment of the Islamic Republic headed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, provided the basis for the modern mass emigration from Iran. An estimated two million people left Iran during and immediately after the Iranian Revolution. Many were the aforementioned Iranian students who chose simply to never to return home. Others left for countries like the United States, which was sympathetic to Iranians who opposed the new Islamist regime, or countries in the Persian Gulf like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar.

Iranian emigration continued into the 1980s and beyond. A motivating factor for young Iranian men at this time was in order to avoid being drafted into military service in the Iran-Iraq War, a vicious conflict which included extensive use of chemical weapons and which ran from 1980 to 1988. In more recent times, owing to extensive sanctions against Iran’s oil industry and wider economy in response to its nuclear weapons program, the country‘s economy has done poorly and this has led to economic migration of younger, well-educated Iranians. This has been further augmented by the illiberalism and repression of the Iranian regime under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a leader who has become more and more conservative after the demise of a reform movement in Iran during the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s. All of these factors have made a steady stream of Iranian emigration a factor of life here since the late 1970s.

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Extent of Iranian emigrationExtent of Iranian emigration

Iranian emigration has been very substantial since the 1970s. At the time that the Iranian Revolution began in 1978 there were approximately 100,000 Iran students studying abroad. Nearly half of these were in the United States, with the rest primarily in the United Kingdom, France, Austria, West Germany and Italy. These typically came from more secular, liberal Iranian families. After the Revolution many chose to remain in the countries they were domiciled in and their families often joined them there, creating a sizeable bit of Iranian emigration. On top of this, hundreds of thousands of other Iranians left the country as an Islamic religious government came into being in the course of 1979.

In the course of the 1980s the level of permanent settlement and migration to the United States increased steadily as more and more people left the new Islamic Iran. The Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles became the center of Iranian settlement in the US, so much so that it became unofficially known as Tehrangeles, a portmanteau of Tehran and Los Angeles. In the course of the 1980s and 1990s Persian cafes, restaurants and other establishments sprung up here. Over time this drew more and more Iranians and local streets and the like were even renamed to reflect the Iranian community’s influence here. There is, for instance, a Persian Square along Westwood Boulevard. Approximately 130,000 Iranian Americans now live in Tehrangeles, making it one of the largest concentrations of Iranians anywhere in the world outside of Iran itself.

Another major location for Iranian émigrés since the Iranian Revolution is France. Iranian emigration to France has actually been occurring since the mid-nineteenth century, a product perhaps of France’s universities being the first centers of what was then called oriental studies in Europe. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries several hundred Persians who were opposed to the Qajar Dynasty that ruled Persia between 1794 and 1925 arrived to live in France. In 1912 a Persian newspaper, the Irānšahr even started publication in Paris. By the time of the Revolution in the late 1970s there were around 6,000 Iranians living in France. That number has expanded exponentially since and Paris in particular, as well as Marseille in the south, has become a center of Iranian settlement in the country.

Abolhassan Banisadr

Still, this emigration is often more complex than a simple before and after the Iranian Revolution-type situation in which people simply left Iran in ever larger numbers after the late 1970s. For instance, Abolhassan Banisadr was an Iranian émigré who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in France. He returned to Iran in an act of reverse emigration early in 1979 and became the first President of the Islamic Republic. But he subsequently fell fowl of the Ayatollah and went into exile again in France in the 1980s.

Beyond the western world, there is a long tradition of Persian/Iranian emigration to other parts of the Persian Gulf. This extends back to the nineteenth century and reflects the role of Persian merchants as managers of commerce in one of the world’s most important trading waterways. Going back centuries non-Arabs were referred to as Ajam (a word used to describe someone who speaks a foreign tongue or something indistinct) in the ports on the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf. In practice nearly all Ajam were in fact Persians and often settled in the ports here to act as intermediaries for Persian trade in the region. These Ajam constitute a significant proportion of the population of both Kuwait and Bahrain today. Moreover, because these communities are of longstanding in places like Kuwait City, it is estimated that anywhere between 20% and 30% of the population of Kuwait have Persian/Iranian ancestry of some kind. A similar level of emigration has been observed from Iran to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in modern times. Studies suggest that at least half a million people in Dubai today are Iranian and the figure may be as high as 800,000, meaning that Iranians make up a sizeable proportion of the population of most of the smaller Gulf states.

Demographic impact of Iranian emigrationDemographic impact of Iranian emigration

Toronto – A new center of Iranian migration

The demographic impact of Iranian emigration has, as noted, been seen most clearly in places like Los Angeles, Kuwait City, Dubai and Paris. The Iranian diaspora also has strong presences in countries like Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Turkey, Australia and the United Kingdom, in each of which there are well in excess of 100,000 people of Iranian descent living. In the twenty-first century the greater Toronto region in Canada has emerged as a new major center of the Iranian diaspora to rival Los Angeles and Paris. There are over 88,000 people of Iranian heritage living in Toronto today.

The one thing which has certainly not occurred as a result of this Iran emigration is any reduction in the size of the population of Iran. There were just over 38 million people living in Iran in 1979 when the Revolution led to the overthrow of the Shah. That figure has increased by 140% to around 92 million people in 2025. The flight of several million Iranians to countries like the United States, France and the Gulf States has not curbed population growth at all, in part because those who have left have been more than replaced by inward arriving migrants from other countries, especially Afghanistan, a country that the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, the same year as the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, and which has been beset by problems ever since. Hence, while Iranian emigration has created a complex diaspora from Los Angeles to Paris, and from Dubai to Kuwait City, it has not had a negative impact on the overall population levels of Iran itself.

See alsoSee also

• Iran
• Iranian Revolution
• Persian surnames
• California
• California historical records
• California marriage records index
• California death records index

Explore more about Iranian emigrationExplore more about Iranian emigration

• Iran: A Vast Diaspora Abroad and Millions of Refugees at Home at Migration Policy Institute
• The Untold Iranian Story of the UAE at BBC Monitoring
• They can’t go back to Iran. So L.A. Persians built ‘Tehrangeles’ and made it their own at Los Angeles Times
• Persian Community in France at Encyclopaedia Iranica
• California Births records collection on MyHeritage
• California Marriages records collection on MyHeritage
• California Deaths records collection on MyHeritage

References

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