June 17, 2022
The US Census Bureau now believes there are 385,000 Iranian-born persons living in the United States, not counting their children and grandchildren who also make up the Iranian community in the United States.
That number comes from the last American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau in 2019 and was substantially more than the numbers produced by previous such surveys. (See the accompanying chart.)
Considerable statistical data on the Iranian-American community collected by the Census Bureau and other organizations was collected and published recently by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in a 13-page document titled simply, “Immigrants from Iran in the United States.”
The 385,000 Iranian-born residents of the United States make the US by far the largest host to expatriate Iranians. Following behind the United States, according to mid-2019 estimates by the UN Population Division, are Canada with 164,000 Iranian-born residents; Germany with 127,000, Britain with 90,000 and Turkey with 83,000.
The American Community Survey also asks people about their ancestry to pick up the ethnicity of those born in the US. That calculation put the total Iranian diaspora in the United States—those born in Iran and those born in the United States—at 577,000 as of 2019. That is far less than the 1 million and greater numbers claimed by some expatriate groups. The ACS number is based on self-identification. Some people with an Iranian grandparent may identify themselves with the ethnicity of another grandparent to whom they were closer and not mention their Iranian background.
The MPI says that looking at the other nationality groups living in the United States, the Iranian-born population is more likely to hold a college degree, to have higher income, and to command greater proficiency in English.
It is no surprise to anyone that the Iranian-born in the United States are concentrated in California. In fact, fully 54 percent of all Iranian immigrants live in California with 29 percent of the total living in Los Angeles alone. No other state comes close to California. In second place is Texas with 8 percent of the Iranian-born, followed by New York with 5 percent and Virginia (mainly the DC suburbs of Northern Virginia) in fourth place with 4 percent.
In terms of metropolitan areas, 36 percent of the Iranian-born live in the greater Los Angeles area, 6 percent in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area and 5 percent each in the New York City, San Francisco and Silicon Valley metropolitan areas.
Iranians form 1 percent of the population of the LA area and 0.8 percent of those in Silicon Valley, but only very small portions of other communities.
Some 36 percent of all those Iranians over the age of 5 reported only limited English proficiency—but that was much better than the average for all immigrants, which was 46 percent.
Of immigrants aged 25 and up, 59 percent of the Iranians reported having at least a BA, compared to 33 percent for all immigrants and the same figure for US-born Americans. Only 7 percent of Iranian immigrants lacked a high school diploma or its equivalent, compared to 26 percent of all immigrants and 8 percent of US-born Americans.
Iranian immigrants were also significantly richer, reporting a medium household income of $79,000 as of 2019, compared to $64,000 for all immigrants and $66,000 for the US-born population.
The paper from the MPI may be accessed on the internet at https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/iranian-immigrants-united-states-2021.
