The diaspora is the I.R.'s longest-running crime against its own people.
Since the revolution, the people have left in waves — driven out by political repression, economic collapse, and the suffocation of basic freedoms. The flight never stopped. As many as 200,000 leave every year, and international monitoring bodies have consistently ranked the homeland among the world's highest brain-drain nations. The total number of those who've left has grown from roughly half a million before the revolution to more than 3 million — and today, with second and third generations counted, the diaspora numbers in the many millions more.
Almost none of them chose to leave lightly. The vast majority never return — they leave behind parents, siblings, and friends. The severing of contact is not only permanent but episodic and traumatic. During the uprisings of early 2026, the I.R. cut off all internet and phone service, leaving diaspora members unable to reach loved ones for weeks. Families abroad found out about deaths and arrests not through a phone call — but through the absence of one.
The same scenario has repeated across every crisis. During the conflict of mid-2025, the I.R. imposed what digital rights experts called the worst communications shutdown ever recorded — blocking traffic in both directions, not just restricting access but cutting contact entirely. People in the diaspora watched missile alerts in real time, unable to warn family members to move. Others paid premium rates to middlemen at the border who held two phones together just to connect a conversation.
This is the lived reality of the diaspora — not the comfortable distance of exile, but the daily anxiety of separation from people they love inside a homeland held hostage. They did not leave. The homeland was taken from them.