Iranian immigration to the United States was insignificant until the 1950s and 1960s, when many young Iranians began to study at American universities. After the 1979 revolution in Iran, many Iranian students stayed in the United States and were joined by their families, taking up residence mostly in metropolitan areas. According to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1990 the median age of all Iranian immigrants in the United States was just over thirty years old. Since the early 1980s, notable Iranian American communities, made up almost entirely of immigrants, developed in New York, Texas, Maryland, and Virginia, with the largest population centers found in southern California. It is estimated that more than half the Iranian American population resides in the San Fernando Valley, Orange County, and the west side of Los Angeles.
According to the 1980 census, there were 121,000 Iranian Americans living in the United States at that time. In the 1990 census, 236,000 Americans identified themselves as having Iranian ancestry, with 211,000 reporting Iran as their place of birth. Of the total Iranian American population, just over 27 percent were listed as naturalized citizens. Between 1981 and 1990, 154,800 Iranians were admitted to the United States as immigrants; of those, nearly 47,000 were granted permanent resident status as refugees. Continued turmoil in the Persian Gulf in the 1990s meant continued refugee migration from Iran. Between 1991 and 1998 another 96,900 Iranian immigrants were admitted into the United States, of which 22,327 were listed as refugees. Estimates from the 2000 census for the total population of Iranian Americans range from 500,000 to as high as 800,000 or 1,100,000—numbers that members of the Iranian American community say underrepresent the population, due to the uncertain reporting methods on ancestry and race.
Iranian Americans are among the more educated immigrants in the United States, and most are members of the technical, professional, and entrepreneurial classes. More than 80 percent of Iranian Americans are fluent in English, and nearly half have earned college degrees. The majority are engineers, teachers, doctors, and business owners, and the median income of Iranian Americans is higher than the national average. In spite of their success as immigrants, Iranian Americans have suffered discrimination at times because they are mistakenly associated with the actions of the government of Iran (a regime they fled) and because they are sometimes mistakenly identified as being from various countries in the Middle East. After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., in September 2001, more restrictions were placed on temporary visas from Iran and on Iranian immigration as the relationship between Iran and the United States continued to be strained.
Bibliography
Bahrampour, Tara. To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Bill, James A. The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988.
Farhang, Mansour. U.S. Imperialism: The Spanish-American War to the Iranian Revolution. Boston: South End Press, 1981.
Sullivan, Zohreh T. Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
