Afshin, a 29-year old barber from Tehran, had been thinking of moving to Turkey for the past 10 years. But it was only two months ago when he felt like he no longer had a choice.

“My life was like walking on a blade,” he said. Like many middle-class Iranians, Afshin was hard hit by the United States' renewed sanctions against Tehran in November 2018. “After the sanctions [were reinstated], the prices of goods shot up,” he said. 

President Donald Trump’s decision to opt out of a nuclear deal brokered in 2015 sent Iran’s currency plunging, which in turn led to soaring inflation inside the country. “I had to sell my car and move from a big house to a small house. But then I lost my store,” Afshin said. That’s when he decamped to Istanbul and opened a new barbershop there.

Iranian migration to Turkey is no historic first. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 sparked the arrival of close to 1.5 million Iranians into its westward neighbor. Fleeing the newly established Islamic Republic’s stringent conservative laws as well as political or religious persecution, those Iranian refugees were temporarily adopted by Turkish authorities, though they were encouraged to relocate to the West.