Nader Yarahmadi, head of the Foreign Nationals Affairs Center at Iran’s Ministry of Interior, says the number of foreign students in the country has fallen from approximately 600,000 to 320,000. He also said that the Islamic Republic has introduced stricter conditions for extending migrants’ residency permits.
Iran’s Ministry of Education had previously announced that around 600,000 Afghan students were enrolled in schools across the country. However, Yarahmadi has reported a decline of approximately 280,000 students, putting the current number of foreign students at around 320,000.
A significant portion of this decline is attributed to the deportation and return of migrants. Nader Yarahmadi said that nearly 1.8 million undocumented migrants were deported from Iran last year. According to him, the country’s foreign-national population has also fallen from 6.1 million to fewer than five million.
These remarks come as Afghanistan’s education system, under Taliban rule, faces widespread restrictions. Hundreds of thousands of girls have been barred from continuing their education beyond the sixth grade, and the Taliban have kept the doors of secondary and high schools closed to girls for nearly five years.
There have also been numerous reports of bans or restrictions on the enrollment of Afghan students in Iranian schools. Fars, Kerman, and Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad provinces are among the areas where previous reports have documented cases of restrictions on the enrollment of Afghan students in educational institutions.
Writer:Salima Aryaei
