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From Iranian Studies to Studies of Iranians in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mehdi Bozorgmehr
Mehdi Bozorgmehr*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, The City College and The Graduate School, The City University of New York
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Extract

More than any other Factor, The Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 and its aftermath have contributed to the growth of the Iranian diaspora population worldwide. The revolution precipitated the exodus of Iranian exiles or political refugees, and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran further discouraged the return of many Iranians already abroad. As a result, by about 1990, 637,500 Iranians were enumerated in official national censuses of the following ten countries on four continents: U.S., Canada, West Germany, Sweden, Great Britain, France, Norway, Australia, Israel, and Japan.

With an Iranian population—defined as persons either born in Iran or of Iranian ancestry—of 285,000 in 1990, the U.S. contained nearly half (45%) of the Iranians living in the above-mentioned Western and Asian countries. This overwhelming concentration, an availability of good data on immigrants (including Iranians), and a number of Iranian students who have become social scientists in the U.S., have encouraged research on this group.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 1: Iranians in America , Winter 1998 , pp. 4 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1998

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Georges Sabagh for his typically generous input in this paper, Richard Bernard for running the Census PUMS data, and Claudia Der-Martirosian for providing the original computer programs. I am grateful to Claudia Der-Martirosian, Arlene Dallalfar, Mohsen Mobasher, and Hamid Naficy for their comments. This research was supported, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation and, in part, by a grant from the City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program.

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12. Iranian undergraduate students by far outnumbered the graduate students in the 1960s and even 1970s. See Askari et al., “Iran's Migration,” table 8.

13. Data compiled by the author from various INS Statistical Yearbooks.

14. Bozorgmehr and Sabagh, “High Status Immigrants.”

15. If Iranians are concerned, and they seem to be, about the accuracy of their given population size, they should make sure that the census questionnaire is properly filled out. In as much as the census is the most widely regarded source of reliable data, its figure has far-reaching implications for the needs of this population.

16. This population is larger than 121,505 reported earlier by Bozorgmehr and Sabagh, “High Status Immigrants,” table 4, because it includes Iranians born in the U.S. and elsewhere.

17. Moreover, the sex ratio among Iranians became more balanced by 1990 than it was in 1980, though the percentage of males still exceeded that of females.

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