Four decades of policy making on Iranian diaspora: critical analysis and practical approaches

Immigration, in general, and "Iranian immigrants” in particular are recognized as serious issues that, despite their high importance, have not been adequately addressed in the academic literature and in the field of policy-making. In the present article, an analytical-critical approach based on exploratory data is used to offer a pathological image of post-revolutionary governments' attitude towards the phenomenon of Iranian migration. More precisely, the present study was an attempt to investigate and identify the social harms of Islamic Republic of Iran’s policies with regard to Iranian immigrants. As for methodology, in the present study the opinions of 28 policy-making and immigration experts involved in affairs of Iranians living abroad were surveyed and collected through questionnaires. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (Kendall's coefficient of concordance, one sample t-test and Friedman test) within the framework of SPSS software.According to the research findings, a total of 16 harms were identified in the process of policy-making regarding Iranian immigration. Organizational disparity and lack of access to a reference institution with the power to make the final decision were recognized as major harms. Other harms extracted in this field include security attitudes towards Iranian immigrants, parallelism, lack of legal surety bond for the return of Iranian immigrants, lack of data banks, the legislative gaps in this area, and so on.In general, it can be argued that a series of measures taken by the Islamic Republic of Iran have actually served as migration driving and encouraging factors.