Afraid to Go Back Home

Afraid to Go Back Home Most Iranian students in the U.S. are staying put

Bye-bye,Shah!" shouted Iranian students as they hurled rocks and bottles at his sister's house in Beverly Hills last January. But now that they have got what they wanted and Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi has been driven from the Peacock Throne, most of the students are not any happier. Only a relative few are returning to the country for whose liberation they had protested so vociferously.

Demonstrations have virtually ceased while the bewildered students anxiously wait, along with the rest of the world, to see what will happen next in their turbulent homeland. The uncertain Bazargan government, at odds with Iran's revolutionary committees and subject to the Delphic dictates of the Ayatullah Khomeini, is not exactly what the youths had in mind when they called for a new regime.

Under the pro-American Shah, Iran had some 50,000 students on American campuses, by far the largest group of foreign students in the U.S. (the next biggest: the 14,000 Taiwanese). About 18,000 of them received some kind of Iranian government subsidy, and most were enrolled in engineering, business or science courses at Western, Southern or Southwestern universities. Some devout Muslim students have returned home. Others are being lured back by various inducements, including the promise of relaxed admissions standards at Iranian universities. Explains Saied Moezzi, a junior in engineering at the University of Kansas: "For some students, it was like a gold rush. Some activists went home to get jobs with the government. Today a nobody can suddenly become someone. People nobody has heard of are Vice Premiers." A few leftist zealots are returning to bring the revolution to what they believe should be its proper Marxist conclusion. "This will be pure Marxism, not Marxism with Soviet overtones," insists a dental student at the University of Illinois. But disconcerting reports have come back that some of the Marxists have been given a cool welcome by the regime and are under surveillance.

Most students are showing prudence. At the University of Oklahoma, for example, about 20 of the 525 Iranian students have gone back. At the University of California at Berkeley, just one out of 156 has returned. Students with relatives who have been forced into exile or executed by the Khomeini government are obviously going to stay put. Others have been getting word from friends or relatives to keep their distance. An electrical engineering student at the University of Wisconsin describes his latest phone conversation with his father, who is still in Iran. "He seems afraid, like when the Shah was in power. He said, 'Don't goof off over there.' That means don't say any bad things about Khomeini or you will be in trouble with the government when you come home."

For many disillusioned students, revolution has replaced one tyranny with another. A junior at the University of Southern California, Said Djabbari, 21, wanted to go back but now has misgivings. "The previous government wielded an iron fist in a velvet glove," he says. "This new regime doesn't give a damn about the glove." Adds a social science student at the University of Kansas: "The Ayatullah sounds exactly like the Shah. Previously, if I opposed the government, I was opposing the Shah. Now they tell me I'm opposing God."

Students are also more inclined to remain in America because their financial difficulties have eased. During the height of the revolution, from early January to mid-March, their money from home was cut off. Now funds have started flowing again, from both private sources and the Iranian government. Some universities, however, are tightening admissions requirements for Iranian students unless they can prove they have sufficient financial resources.

Once a student winds up his studies in America, however, he faces a problem: it is not that easy to stay on. To obtain a permanent visa, students need some skill that is in short supply in the U.S., a requirement few can meet. The State Department is considering granting asylum to the pro-Shah students, who would be in peril if they went home. Others, without this protection, may follow the course of so many foreigners and slip into the shadowy world of illegal aliens. For all the drawbacks of that way of life, many students would doubtless prefer it to the risk of brutality and oppression in Iran.

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