Iranians constitute one of the most numerous new immigrant groups from the Middle East, and one of the highest status foreign-born groups in the United States. Yet there are few published studies documenting their immigration to the United States, and their characteristics. An understanding of different aspects of Iranian adaptation to the United States requires a basic knowledge of their immigration history, and demographic, social and economic characteristics.

This paper presents the first systematic and comprehensive profile of Iranians in the U.S. based on the most recent available statistical data. The sources for this analysis are: (1) all available published reports from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and from the 1980 U.S. Census; (2) INS data tapes on Iranian immigrants admitted to the U.S.from 1972 to 1986; and (3) the 5 percent sample tape from the 1980 U.S. Census of population.

My mother's mother Kaukab Khanum (Madam Dahlia) was convinced that our family was accursed. Along with her sister, uncles, and a handful of cousins, she had left her native city of Kirman in southern Iran in the 1890s, plodded through deserts, crossed mountains, and reached the Persian Gulf port of Lengeh, whence an Arab dhow provided a tortuous trip to Bombay, India. They were running away from famine, endemic in southern Iran at the turn of the century.

Kaukab Khanum believed that our family was accursed because in their eagerness to leave and for expediency, they had abandoned a blind cousin barely fifteen years old. Times were bad, the destination vague, the trip arduous and tricky.

This incident occurred in 1943, a year after the Shah had succeeded his father and was recounted by A. C. Millspough, then financial advisor to the Iranian government.

By the 1970s, however, the Iranian government was denying the relevance of the “guns versus butter” tradeoff for the country. The Shah posed the problem differently, “What is the use of having an advanced industry in a country which could be brought to its knees when faced with any small asinine event?” Asked on a subsequent occasion whether the desire for maximum national power implicit in such defense expenditure was compatible with the efforts to achieve maximum economic development, he replied, “It is not only compatible but essential.

Until recently, a dominant approach in the history and anthropology of the Middle East has rested on the assumption that an “ethnic” or “tribal” group is, or approximates, a biologically self-perpetuating population, sharing elements of a common culture and identifying itself and being identified with others as a separate category. This fundamentally objectivist approach is a refinement of an older anthropological tradition in which “cultures” are treated as coterminous with “tribes”, “societies”, “peoples”. Even if the many current adherents of this approach do not take the biological assumptions too literally, there is still a strong tendency to conceive of populations as divided into formally bounded, clear-cut, ethnic groups or tribes, with every person belonging to one: a conception that facilitates tidy maps, neat lists of the traits associated with each group, a rigorous classification of types, and cross-cultural comparison.