Baha'i Immigration to California

Groundwork: The Return of Narrative

Greetings, we welcome all historical refugees here at MEM, bring your knowledge boots and get ready for a thorough trek through the history of California immigration. Apologies must be made and the tardiness of these two posts mustn’t be taken as a sign of insincerity, nay the converse is true! Literally through physical, emotional and most definitely economic hardship I have compiled a group of secondary sources and statistics regarding the policies the United States used to either admit or deny middle eastern refugees into the country. Following similar trends will lead us to the Baha’i; A relatively new religion that found its roots in Iran and the prophet Baha ‘u’llah (pronounced BAH- HA -OO LA). After the Iranian revolution periods of intensified persecution of various Baha’I and other non-Islamic sects led to massive flights in the 1980’s and the 1990’s respectively. In thorough discussion over the reasons for the two spikes in Iranian immigration to the United States Professor Vahid Fozdar and I synthesized that most likely the came in response of two fairly distinct events. The first was rather obvious, the Iranian revolution and the months immediately following that constituted the governmental purge of “antievolutionaries.” The broadness and totality of the suppression the Ayatollah used to squelch his opponents reached far across Iran and took months to achieve. This would account for the previously provided statistics on immigration spikes coming from Iran. The second and most significant spike in Persian immigration to the U.S. came during the early 1990’s and was largely the result of two events. Within Iran the powerful Imam and founder of the Islamic Republic had died leaving an incredibly large power vacuum in his wake. The subsequent power struggles between leading Mulla’s took on traditional revolutionary form. Opponents were met with frequent protesting crowds demanding violent change or removal from candidacy, or outright imprisonment or in worse cases death. As is the case with many violent changes of power, ideologies can switch radical directions in order to emblazon political fervor into reactionary thinking. This caused a massive moral crackdown that lead to many non-Islamic or less religious groups to flee. As the Baha’I community does not receive the same exemptions as due Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians as “people of the book” they received massive persecution because they were largely seen as heretical (This is due to the fact they claim Baha ‘u’ llah is a prophet of God who came after Mohammad).
In order to adequately analyze the plight of Baha’is fleeing Iran I contacted the Persian American Affairs Office that operates in conjunction with the Baha’I National Center. After a length waiting period and a number of online introductions and wordy emails attempting to explain my topic I was eventually and graciously awarded a compilation of statistics that are specifically related to Baha’I immigration into the United States. This Graph shows that from 1901 to 1972 only 58 Persians immigrated to the United States.

Year USA Arrivals
unknown 138
1901 2
1911 1
1917 1
1919 1
1937 1
1940 2
1941 1
1943 1
1944 2
1947 2
1950 1
1951 1
1953 1
1955 1
1956 3
1957 1
1958 4
1959 3
1960 2
1961 3
1962 7
1963 4
1964 2
1965 1
1967 4
1969 1
1970 2
1971 1
1972 2
58

The story takes a grim shift at that point because during the late 1960’s and into the early 70’s the political situation in Iran destabilized thoroughly. Riots became more and more common as Khomeini and his Bazaari (powerful Iranian merchants) allies spread the rhetoric of revolution in and out of the country at theological centers in Qom, and Najaf in Iraq. This forced many people who were in support of the pro-Western Shah to either flee, or plan to, fearing death, persecution and war. The impending revolution can be seen through the remainder of these statistics.
1973 110
1974 173
1975 195
1976 357
1977 543
1978 578
1979 1593
1980 801
1981 396
1982 439
1983 234
1984 368
1985 329
1986 559
1987 414
1988 334
1989 320
1990 261
1991 159
1992 164
1993 205
1994 214
1995 224
1996 368
1997 440
1998 549
1999 306
2000 874
2001 1378
2002 787
2003 1027
2004 993
2005 953
2006 1120
2007 1155
2008 775
2009 913
2010 356
Total 21102

The most obvious spikes come from the 1979 Revolution and the 2001 war on terror and again during the war on Iraq in 2003. This is very interesting, showing how local populations, fearing religious persecution will leaves, if not in force, in increments. This is quite parallel to a statistic provided by Roger Daniels in Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 the numbers of refugees and asylees allowed into the United States since WWII. While not directly for the purposes of this study, it does show more than a million person increase in the years following the 1979 revolution. What maybe is more important is that in 1980 the international community, namely the United States, adopted legislation defining what a refugee is,

“any person who is outside any country of his nationality or in the case of any person having no nationality, is outside of any country in which he last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country because of persecution, or a well-founded fear of persecution, on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion…”


Understandably this is in response to a major international problem regarding the status of peoples who lost their homes due to the copious amount of national liberation wars that had sprung out of the corpse of imperial countries and their aspirations of subjugation. As a result 5,286 Baha’I have made their way to California and sporadically have taken up residence all along the coast. I will be doing more and more analysis of this information soon, I am only allowed to stare at computer screens for 30 minutes at a time. Most Likely I will be posting more frequently with information as it arises.