Iranian Americans

Iranian Americans are citizens or nationals of the United States who are of Iranian ancestry. Iranian Americans are among the most highly educated people in the United States. They have historically excelled in business, academia, science, the arts, and entertainment. Many have become doctors, engineers, lawyers, and tech entrepreneurs. Most Iranian Americans arrived in the United States after 1979, as a result of the Iranian Revolution and the fall of the Persian monarchy, with over 40% settling in California, specifically Los Angeles. Unable to return to Iran, they have created many distinct ethnic enclaves, such as the Los Angeles Tehrangeles community in Westwood, Los Angeles. Based on a 2012 announcement by the National Organization for Civil Registration, an organization of the Ministry of Interior of Iran, the United States has the highest number of Iranians outside the country. Research by the Iranian Studies Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 estimated the number of Iranian Americans at 691,000, about half of which live in the US state of California. "Iranian-American" is sometimes used interchangeably with "Persian-American", partly due to the fact that, in the Western world, Iran was known as "Persia". On the Nowruz of 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi asked foreign delegates to use the term Iran, the endonym of the country used since the Sasanian Empire, in formal correspondence. Since then the use of the word "Iran" has become more common in the Western countries. This also changed the usage of the terms for Iranian nationality, and the common adjective for citizens of Iran changed from "Persian" to "Iranian." In 1959, the government of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Reza Shah Pahlavi's son, announced that both "Persia" and "Iran" could officially be used interchangeably. The issue is still debated today. There is a tendency among Iranian-Americans to categorize themselves as "Persian" rather than "Iranian", mainly to dissociate themselves from the negative stereotypes of Iranians in media.