From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Iranians/Minoo Moallem
There have been at least two migratory waves of Iranians to Canada. The first, between 1964 and 1978, was part of a broader movement of professionals from the Third World to more advanced, capitalist countries. In the early 1960s, following a rise in oil prices, the shah was able to realize his ambition to modernize the country, thereby ensuring its integration into the Western bloc. Money from the export of oil permitted Iran not only to achieve rapid industrialization, but also to send more and more young people abroad to study at Western institutions of higher education.
As a result of the country’s need for professional workers, an ever-growing number of Iranian families encouraged their children to study abroad. Furthermore, in this period the middle class acquired the means to travel, especially to the United States. According to one estimate, the number of Iranians studying in foreign countries grew from 18,000 in 1963 to 227,497 fourteen years later. Some sources have suggested that by 1979 there were 40,000 to 50,000 Iranian students in the United States alone. The increase in the number of such students and the intensification of repression in pre-revolutionary Iran resulted in a radicalization of the student movement and the creation of the Confederation of Iranian Students, which was active in Canada as well as in the United States and Europe.
The first wave of immigration to Canada was composed primarily of single men and families from professional backgrounds. In these cases, the decision to leave the homeland was made voluntarily. Among Iranians who chose to settle in Canada were those who had married native-born Canadians or who had studied at Canadian universities and remained in this country to work. The immigrants who arrived in the first wave were predominantly doctors and other professionals who had been selectively recruited within the available labour force. Because of their privileged position, these newcomers were able to integrate with relative ease into Canadian society, and, as a result of such factors as the pro-West position of the monarchy in Iran, they did not face racism. They experienced the process of migration as individuals, not as a group, and were therefore not linked in a formal sense through an organization or community.
In the decade following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, however, Iranian immigration to Canada added a new ethnic community to the population of this country. The influx was largely involuntary and was characterized by a considerable number of requests for refugee status. It was linked to socio-political changes caused by the revolution, the establishment of a theocratic state, and the persecution of those groups professing political ideologies different from the Islamic regime. These included certain religious or ethnic minorities and some feminist or women-centred organizations. The majority of progressive forces, including women, had supported the revolution in an attempt to form a united front against the shah and had hoped to resolve their differences after they achieved their goal, but this harmony quickly came to an end once the monarchy was overthrown.
The Islamic state from the very beginning denied any right on the part of those who had participated in the revolution – workers, national minorities, and women, among others – to oppose it, and it supported class, sexual, and ethnic inequality and discrimination in the post-revolutionary era. The Islamization of the country, including repressive measures taken against unveiled women, attacks on the advocates of different political ideologies, and pressure on national minorities that led to civil war in Kurdistan, produced a surge in emigration. Further, the hardships created by the Iran-Iraq War provoked an intense socio-political and economic crisis.
For some migrants, settlement in a new homeland was facilitated by the existence of networks of family and friends who had arrived earlier. In Canada such assistance has been particularly effective. Mutual-aid and information networks have supported dislocated Iranians who have come to this country as students or tourists and stayed in the hope of obtaining immigrant status. In fact, the changes that followed the revolution in Iran created two groups within the second wave of immigration: those who left during the upheaval itself and those who departed later.
The first group was composed primarily of members of the bourgeoisie and individuals who had enjoyed a certain socio-political or economic importance within the old regime, that is, the military, state functionaries, and administrators. These individuals were able to move their financial capital abroad, given the relatively favourable exchange rate of Iranian currency. The second element consisted of members of the urban middle class, who left primarily because of political repression and the Iran-Iraq War. Many of them had remained after the revolution, expecting the political climate to change, but had eventually given up hope. The consolidation of the Islamic regime motivated a large number to leave the country and find a better life abroad. Iran ranked thirteenth among the countries furnishing Canada with immigrants in the years 1985–86, and 10 percent of those seeking refugee status in this period were from that country. In 1983 Iran had been added to the list of countries from which individuals could be admitted on humanitarian grounds.
Since Iran had for a long time been a pluralist society, those groups threatened by the Islamization of the country represented a considerable proportion of emigrants. The Jews, Armenians, Assyrians, and Zoroastrians have been tolerated as “people of the book,” in the words of the Koran. But the same cannot be said of the Baha’is (adherents of a religion founded in the nineteenth century), who are not legally recognized in Iran. Although its roots are Islamic, the Baha’is denied that Muhammed is the final prophet; therefore, they have been subjected to exclusion and discrimination by the state and the Shiite majority and have been the object of severe persecution intended to provoke massive emigration. The Islamic republic has taken measures to locate and identify Baha’is, dismiss them from government jobs, confiscate their property, imprison them, and execute those men and women who insist on maintaining their religious faith. The persecution has pushed Baha’i members of the privileged classes, already familiar with North America through business and other contacts, to emigrate to this continent. Canada adopted humanitarian measures for the Baha’is in 1981 and has offered immigrant status to many of them. The community in this country has been important in the sponsorship of newcomers who failed to meet immigration criteria.
One of the interesting aspects of Iranian migration has been the decision of many women to leave the country, even under difficult circumstances. They have often initiated the departure, taking responsibility for the necessary preparations, risking much in crossing the border, sometimes while they were pregnant or had young children, and leaving behind husbands and family members. Many women have suffered political and economic repression since the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran. They had actively participated in the opposition against the shah’s dictatorship, but were quickly disillusioned when, after the revolution, they found themselves the first target of the new regime and were forced back into what was defined, in patriarchal Islamic ideology, as their “appropriate place.”
Measures taken by the republic to impel women to conform to its particular ideology exacerbated discrimination and oppression on the part of state institutions and the labour market. Their repression after the revolution has had many different dimensions: legal, political, economic, cultural, and social. Those women who did not accept Islamic values, morality, and policies, such as the imposition of hijab (veiling), the effective elimination of women from non-traditional jobs, and their barring from legal practice, were victimized and punished through imprisonment, fines, loss of employment, exclusion from educational opportunities, and public humiliation.
While some women could find ways of resisting the dominant ideology and remained in the homeland, for others the search for a new country in which to settle became the only route to survival. The decision to emigrate was a reaction to restrictions in the public sphere and the labour market in general, cuts in public spending, the closure of childcare facilities, and forced redundancy in the name of “purification.” Over the course of the seven months preceding March 1987, 11,000 people, the majority of them women, were reportedly dismissed from government employment. The situation was especially difficult for educated middle- and upper-middle-class women, who had been gaining increasing access to the public sphere, the universities, and the labour market in the 1960s and 1970s. Such women now constitute a considerable proportion of the Iranian population abroad. If the first wave of migration to Canada was composed primarily of men, the second involved women to a much greater extent.
The second influx was also familial in character, given that immigrants typically left Iran accompanied by children and other relatives. Sponsorship of family members increased during this period, but such endorsement, although important, has not constituted the dominant form of Iranian immigration to Canada, which includes for the most part involuntary exiles (66.9 percent) and refugees (14.7 percent). These two categories have generally been composed of young people and professionals and have been divided equally between men and women. Among Iranians who arrived during the 1980s, 32 percent were refugees, 32 percent independent immigrants, and 15 percent families. Between 1968 and 1979, by contrast, independent applicants made up the majority of all Iranian newcomers to Canada. Unfortunately, data from federal or provincial immigration authorities do not allow us to specify the proportion of subgroups in the Iranian immigrant population. Many religious and ethno-religious minorities have been part of the second wave of migration; for example, a large number of Kurds left Iran, beginning in the 1980s, at a time of hostility and civil war between the Kurdish nationalist insurgency and the Islamic republic. (See ASSYRIANS; KURDS.)
Until the late 1970s the number of Iranians in Canada never exceeded a few thousand. In the years between 1955 and 1976, 2,531 individuals entered this country. From 1977 to 1982, however, the number of arrivals increased dramatically; 4,968 immigrants came to Canada in those years and another 23,216 in the following decade. It should be noted that the numbers include persons who have identified themselves as Iranians (regardless of place of birth), not simply those born in Iran. According to the 1991 Canadian census, 43,210 individuals said that they were wholly or partially of Iranian ancestry. Of these, close to 39,000 claimed Iranian as their only ethnicity, and nearly 31,000 were born in Iran. Of the total number of Iranians (30,715) who entered Canada between 1956 and 1992, 75 percent arrived after 1983.
Any inferences about the size of the community in Canada must, however, be tentative for the following reasons. Some individuals may have been identified by their religious background and not their ethnicity; others may have been in the process of filing for immigrant or refugee status and thus were not included in the official statistics. In addition, there has been a significant movement of Iranians from Canada into the United States, as well as some return migration to Iran (especially during the 1990s). Further, the desire to identify or not to identify oneself as Iranian could change according to political or social circumstances. Hence, the total number of Iranians in Canada may be higher than the official figures suggest.
The distribution of Iranians (single and multiple responses), according to the 1991 census data, is as follows: Ontario, 24,800; British Columbia, 7,815; Quebec, 6,745; Alberta, 2,095; Manitoba, 675; Saskatchewan, 495; Nova Scotia, 280; and New Brunswick, 220. Individuals have tended to leave the homeland without a precise destination in mind. Familiarity with the host country, often the fact of having been a student here, has played an important part in the choice of province in which to settle. Such experience was particularly decisive for men and women who had studied in francophone universities in Quebec. However, the official distribution by province probably does not reflect the actual numbers in each area at any given time because of frequent migration of Iranians within the country. Such has especially been true between Quebec and Ontario and British Columbia, since, as a result of linguistic difficulties, climate, a lack of business opportunities, or job market restrictions, many Iranians left Quebec to settle in the two other provinces. Since English is the second language spoken in Iran, there has been a tendency to prefer the English-speaking parts of the country. Within Quebec, Iranians have concentrated in the bilingual or predominantly anglophone areas.
Iranians in Canada live mainly in the large cities and are dispersed across the residential areas of these urban centres. Demographically, they are diversified with respect to class, gender, and professed ethnicity and religion, and almost all come from an urban background. Class membership has varied with the different waves of migration. Among the immigrants are a considerable number of intellectuals and professionals, who have set the tone for the cultural milieu of the community across North America, as they have in Europe.
