According to the global bank of emigration rate of all countries in 2017, Iran was ranked 54 among 232 countries with 1,237,344 emigrants. This shows that Iran is far behind the leaders with 178 steps.

According to the information center of national elites foundation, quoted by technology and innovation analytical news database, India ranks first with 16 million, followed by Mexico with 12 million, Russia with 11 million, China with 10 million and Bangladesh with 7 million, respectively.

There is a big difference between people's "desire" to migrate and "action" to migrate. According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2017, more than 700 million people worldwide have a desire to emigrate, about 15 percent of the world's population.

In the same year, the total number of emigrants was 266 million in the world. This figure shows that many people around the world have a mere “desire” to immigrate, and many are those who have done neither “planning” nor “taking action” on immigration.

If we divide this number of people who are willing to emigrate (700 million people) into three categories, there is a big gap between those who have "desire to emigrate" and "planners" and the "actors" group. Therefore, from the population of 700 million who were eager to emigrate, only a few tens of millions of planners and activists remain. According to a survey conducted by the same institute, Iran ranks seventh in the world in terms of the number of adults who wish to emigrate, which would make Iran as one of the top 20 countries if it were calculated in terms of total population.

Now, when we look back at the years of victory of Islamic revolution, Iran had 232,811 emigrants in other countries in 1970s. In other words, the total number of immigrants in this decade was 8.1 per 1000 population of Iran. According to UN data, the net migration rate of Iran in 1970-1975 is 0.51 per 1,000 population.

This rate is obtained by dividing the number of incoming immigrants into the number of emigrants by population, which does not provide an accurate estimate of the number of Iranian immigrants outside Iran. According to World Bank official statistics, the population of Iran has doubled since the Islamic Revolution of 1970-1980. According to the data obtained from this organization, the population of Iran in 1980 was 38,650,246 people, which increased to 80,673,951 persons in 2017. The important note about the number of immigrants is that this rate is not a benchmark for determining the status of expatriates regardless of the country's growing population.

Between 1970-1980, which coincides with the victory of the Islamic Revolution, 8.1 and 13.6 out of every 1,000 were outside of Iran, respectively. In 2017, 15.3 out of every 1,000 people emigrated. With 1970 as the base year for calculation, Iranians' overseas share of the country's total population has increased 1.9 times over the past 47 years. According to the World Bank statistics on immigrants from all countries in 2017, Iranians ranked 54th out of 232 countries with 1,237,344 out of 232 countries, which shows that Iran is 178 steps away from the top of the table.

Technology and Innovation Analytical News Database