If Iran continues to face a decrease in the accumulation of human capital and eventually economic and social losses, this crisis will enter a new phase. This means that the government cannot consider brain drain and the loss of capital as a minor issue, because many of Iran’s challenges today are due to a lack of capital.
First crisis:
According to statistics, Iran is one of the top countries in the world in terms of brain drain, and it is said that 180,000 Iranian specialists leave the country annually. The secretary of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, emphasizing that 54,000 Iranians study abroad, claimed that this was due to a “hostile conspiracy” adding, ‘The enemies of the Islamic Revolution are looking to hunt our elites.’
But the reality is that this issue is beyond the possibility of a ‘conspiracy theory’ and consider the ‘enemy’ as the cause of this challenge.
The chairman of the board of the Tehran Nursing System announced the monthly migration of 500 Iranian nurses abroad and said that most Iranian nurses migrate to North American countries such as Canada and Sweden in Europe, as well as some countries in the Persian Gulf. Iran is even ranked fifth in the United States in terms of foreign doctoral graduates.
A survey of statistics from the past decade (2010 to 2019) shows that, after China, India, South Korea, and Taiwan, immigrants from Iran make up the largest number of US foreign doctoral graduates, and one in 40 foreigners who received a doctorate was Iranian.
In other words, in the last decade, exactly 5,506 Iranians have received doctorates in the United States, and according to 2015 statistics, approximately 5,000 of these people have remained in the United States.
Out of a total of 54,000 Iranian students studying abroad, 25 percent of them have emmigrated with a three-digit entrance exam rank.
Second crisis:
It is not only the elites and students who are leaving the country. Children of some officials and rich people of the society, based on their wealth, do not consider Iran worthy to live in, while their fathers are making Iran a hell to live in.
Seyed Mohammad Gharazi, one of the presidential candidates who was excluded from competing in the upcoming election, about the officials’ children said recently: “Today, 5,000 children of government officials live in the United States and have taken people’s dollars and think they are living, but I am sure they are carrying the humiliation of this world and the hereafter with them and their fathers.”
Mahmoud Bahmani, the governor of the Central Bank during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had said: “At present, $148 billion is the balance of the accounts in foreign banks of the officials’ children, and this is more than Iran’s reserves.”
Abbas Akhoondi, former Minister of Roads and Urban Development also said: “In the last three years, about $15 billion has been spent on buying homes abroad, and with the wrong domestic policies, Iranians have bought 1,600 homes in Turkey in the last three months. According to the Turkish Statistics Center, Iranians are still the largest group of foreign home buyers in the country. The result of the aggressive actions is that in the last 50 years, 3.1 million people have left Iran, that is, 3.8 million of our population have emigrated.”
A recent report published by ILNA stated, ‘Iranian citizens have purchased 5,939 housing units in Turkey.’
Third crisis:
The collapse of money and national capital and the rise in prices have led to the fact that many Afghans prefer the insecurity of their own country than to stay in Iran.
According to statistics, the record for the largest number of undocumented Afghan migrants returning from Iran in 2020 has been broken. Some experts consider the fall in the value of the rial and the difficult labor market conditions as the most important reasons for their return. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that in 2020 alone, about 859,000 Afghan refugees returned from Iran. In recent days, news has been published about a 35 percent increase in the migration of Afghan citizens from Iran.
Conclusion:
The structures are such that the future president of Iran will be not able to bring the country to such a development that the losses will return. The reality is that the people of Iran are at the crossroad of ‘Staying or leaving’. Iran’s today situation is not like in the past and many Iranian families, and their relatives, are people who have emigrated and many of those who have left are longing to leave their homeland and are struggling with the difficult question of whether to leave or stay.
This is the result of 40 years of the mullahs’ rule, and rule of corruption, looting, discrimination, human rights violations, and executions.
