A One-Way Ticket; Fed up with political and economic restrictions, Iranian expat workers are among the least likely in the world to return home.(Cover Story)

Byline: Babak Dehghanpisheh

Not every country benefits when workers go abroad in search of jobs. Each year approximately 200,000 Iranians, many of them highly educated, leave the country for the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. The International Monetary Fund ranks Iran as having the highest rate of brain drain in the world. The reasons aren't difficult to pinpoint: unemployment hovers around 20 percent and the inflation rate is roughly 15 percent. Government restrictions on investment severely limit business opportunities. In Tehran, university teachers and students frequently moonlight as cab drivers to make ends meet.

For young university graduates, many of whom have been exposed to Western culture through satellite television and the Internet, social restrictions in the Islamic Republic are the last straw. "The biggest reason for the brain drain is the lack of democracy in Iran," says Hamid Reza Jalaipour, a sociologist at Tehran University. "Young people feel their personal rights are threatened so they say good riddance to the hard-line clerics and decide to leave."

For the same reasons, very few return. Rana Ghahremanpour, 27, left Iran to pursue graduate studies in electrical engineering in the United States four years ago. At first she considered going back to Iran. "I used to think about it a lot," she says. "But with the present situation I don't want to go back. I know many [Iranians] who have sunk into life in the U.S."

In fact, so many university students have decided to leave in recent years that informal ...