What @BirthGauge’s Iran fertility map actually shows — and the migrant story hiding underneath it
Evidence grading used throughout: DOCUMENTED (official data, primary documents, multiple independent outlets) · REPORTED (credible single-source or partially verified) · ALLEGED (claims circulating without verification) · DOES NOT HOLD (claims the evidence contradicts).
@BirthGauge’s 2025 provincial map puts Iran’s total fertility rate at 1.47 — and three provinces (Alborz 0.88, Gilan 0.91, Mazandaran 0.92) already below 1.0. Tehran and Alborz together: 1.02, South Korea territory.
Most of the commentary has treated this as a straightforward story of a country getting old. It is that. But the map also raises a question almost nobody has asked: who is actually having the children that are still being born in Iran — and whose children does the state want?
I went through the map province by province against what’s known about where foreign nationals live, what the Ministry of Health says about foreign births, and what the IRGC has built out of the migrant population. Here is what holds up, and what doesn’t.
1. First, read the map honestly: the high-fertility provinces are NOT the immigrant provinces
This matters because a version of this story is already circulating — “the regime imported Afghans, Arabs and Pakistanis, and that’s where the birth rate is.” That version does not survive contact with the data. If you’re going to make the immigration argument, you have to make it on the evidence that exists, not on the map alone.
Where the Afghans are (DOCUMENTED). The 2016 census (Iran’s own) puts most Afghan nationals in five provinces: Tehran, Alborz, Isfahan, Khorasan Razavi and Kerman. The older UNHCR/BAFIA breakdown had Tehran alone at 31%, Khorasan 15%, Isfahan 13%, Sistan-Baluchestan 8%, Kerman 6%, Qom and Fars 6% each.
What those provinces show on the map:
The three provinces with the most Afghans have the lowest fertility in the country. The correlation the “immigrant birth rate” story needs simply isn’t there.
Why Sistan-Baluchestan is 3.34 (DOCUMENTED). This is not new and it is not Afghan. The province was at TFR 4.6–5.0 in the late 1990s and 3.5 in 2011, per Iran’s own demographers and the Stanford Iranian Studies review of census data. It’s the poorest province in the country, the only one where the majority lives in rural areas, with contraceptive prevalence below 50% as far back as the World Bank’s 2006 study. The population is overwhelmingly Sunni Baloch — the group the regime massacred in Zahedan on “Bloody Friday” in September 2022. Nobody serious can call them a regime support base.
The same logic applies to the other above-average provinces: Khuzestan (2.14) is Iran’s native Arab population, not imported Arabs — these are the people Tehran sent Iraqi PMF convoys to intimidate during the 2019 floods. Golestan (1.80) is Sunni Turkmen. South Khorasan (2.23) is poor, rural, and was already above replacement in 2021. Kurdistan (1.43) and West Azerbaijan (1.65) have no meaningful migrant population at all.
The real pattern in the map: fertility in Iran today tracks poverty, rurality and Sunni/ethnic-periphery status. Translated: the Iranians still having children at replacement level are disproportionately the ones the Islamic Republic has spent four decades treating as a security problem. That’s a far more damaging fact for the regime than the “imported voters” story — and unlike that story, it’s provable.
2. The migrant births that the map probably can’t see
Here is where the immigration angle becomes real — and it’s a data-visibility problem, not a geography one.
The map is built on civil-registration birth counts (@BirthGauge credits @HsynSyd75182 for the raw provincial numbers, with age structures from Statistical Centre of Iran projections via citypopulation.de). Iranian civil registration (Sabt-e Ahval) issues a shenasnameh to Iranian citizens. Children of foreign nationals get a separate “foreign-national birth certificate” (گواهی ولادت اتباع خارجی), which explicitly confers no citizenship. It is not clear whether the provincial counts behind the map include those births at all. (REPORTED — the methodology note doesn’t specify; I’d treat the map as primarily a measure of Iranian-citizen fertility.)
What the Ministry of Health says about non-Iranian births (DOCUMENTED — Ministry of Health figures, published via the Statistical Centre, reported by Khabar Online and Asr-e Iran, Feb 2024):
Over five years: Iranian births down 22%. Non-Iranian births up 70%. A deputy health minister later put foreign-national births at roughly 10% of all births in the country (Aftab News). In Qom, a provincial health official said in 2021 that one in five births was to a non-Iranian mother. Jomhouri Eslami — one of the regime’s oldest newspapers — reported in 2023 that at a hospital in Kavar, Fars, 297 of 300 babies born one autumn were Afghan.
That last figure is one hospital and should be treated as an anecdote, not a rate (REPORTED). But the trend line is the Ministry’s own.
Afghan fertility as a group (DOCUMENTED at the national level only). Afghanistan’s TFR is 4.84 (UN, 2023) against Iran’s ~1.5. There is no published TFR for Afghans inside Iran by province — anyone who gives you one is estimating. What we can say is that the national-origin gap is more than three children per woman, and that Iran’s own Statistical Centre reported that over 97% of immigrants arriving between March 2023 and March 2024 were from Afghanistan.
So the honest framing is this: the map shows Iranian fertility collapsing. Underneath it, a second population with three times the birth rate was growing — and the state’s own data was tracking it while the public wasn’t told.
3. Did the regime “bring them in”? Two-track policy, not open borders
What the regime’s own media alleged (REPORTED). In July 2023, Aftab News — close to the Rouhani camp, not the opposition — published an unattributed commentary claiming authorities were actively encouraging Afghan population growth: loose eastern-border control, thousands of tourist visas issued daily, minimal enforcement. Tabnak (2024) ran a piece warning Afghans could be one-tenth of Iran’s population and that rising Afghan birth rates alongside falling Iranian ones could eventually affect “political and electoral processes.” These are insider complaints, not proof of a plan — but they show the regime’s own pragmatist wing believed the hardliners were letting it happen.
What the regime actually did next (DOCUMENTED). In March 2025 Tehran ordered all undocumented Afghans out. After the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, expulsions exploded: over 500,000 in 16 days (IOM), 1.6 million between January and October 2025, and by April 2026 the total had passed 2.8 million, with a stated goal of 4 million out of an estimated 4.5 million. Roughly 60% of those pushed out were women and children. This is one of the largest forced population movements of the decade, and Amnesty, IOM and UNHCR have all called it unlawful.
That demolishes the simple version of the “regime imported Afghans for population growth” claim. A state that wanted migrant babies does not deport three million people, families first.
But it makes the selective version sharper. The regime didn’t want Afghans. It wanted a specific Afghan: Shia, Hazara, poor, undocumented, and therefore recruitable.
4. The demographic the IRGC actually built
Fatemiyoun (DOCUMENTED). Founded by Soleimani around a nucleus of Afghans in Mashhad, the Fatemiyoun Division put as many as 50,000 Afghans through Syria — nearly 10,000 at a time at the height of Aleppo. The recruitment offer is documented across MEI, Jamestown, Afghan media and Afghan researchers: $300–$500 a month, permanent residency for the fighter and his immediate family, and “martyr family” status — pensions, burial in Qom or Mashhad, and in some accounts citizenship — if he dies. Former fighters have described being arrested as undocumented and offered a choice: prison, deportation, or Syria. Iran’s parliament passed legislation enabling citizenship for foreigners who fought for Iran. Researchers writing in the journal Afghanistan (2022) describe Fatemiyoun veterans and families as “taking on citizenship characteristics” — the only Afghans in Iran the state has treated as something like citizens.
Zainabiyoun (DOCUMENTED). The Pakistani equivalent, built from Shia pilgrims and seminary students — Al-Mustafa International University in Qom is named repeatedly as a recruitment node — with the same package: salary, residency, children’s schooling, and burial in Qom. Pakistan banned it in 2024 and designated it under anti-terror law in January 2026. The US Treasury sanctioned both brigades in January 2019.
So the “imported support base” is real — it’s just small, Shia, and militarised rather than demographic. Tens of thousands of families, not millions. Concentrated in Mashhad and Qom, not in Zahedan or Ahvaz. And Qom is the one province on the map where you can actually see the signal: 1.53 TFR, and one in five births foreign.
5. Where they are now: on Iranian streets
This is the part the deportation numbers can’t explain away.
DOCUMENTED (on the record, 2019). Mousa Ghazanfarabadi, then head of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, said publicly that if Iranians won’t defend the Revolution, “the Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi, the Afghan Fatemiyoun, the Pakistani Zainabiyoun and the Yemeni Houthis will come to support it.”
DOCUMENTED (2019 floods). PMF units — including elements of US-designated Harakat al-Nujaba — and Fatemiyoun were deployed into flood-hit Khuzestan. Locals described armed convoys as an occupation, not relief.
REPORTED (2022). During Woman, Life, Freedom, Jerusalem Post and Iran International separately reported Lebanese- and Iraqi-accented plainclothes men assisting the Basij; Iran International put one contingent at ~150 Kataib Hezbollah / PMF fighters.
REPORTED (January 2026). Iran International reported ~800 Iraqi militiamen (Kataib Hezbollah, Nujaba, Sayyid al-Shuhada, Badr) deployed within days of the protests starting; an Iraqi security source told other outlets the figure was closer to 5,000 via the Shaib and Zurbatiya crossings. The Telegraph verified video and resident accounts of non-Persian-speaking men in Hashd uniforms manning neighbourhood checkpoints and enforcing hijab in Tehran. NCRI reported Zainabiyoun and Fatemiyoun units housed in schools in Zahedan, Zabol and Chabahar. Iran International claimed these groups carried out “a significant part of the killings” — that specific attribution is ALLEGED and has not been independently verified.
REPORTED (October 2025). Hamedan residents protested after reports that Iraqi students at Bu-Ali Sina University were targeting Iranian female students for “temporary marriage” — the FDD analysis notes the regime presents militia members as “students” and “pilgrims.”
6. The “come to Iran” campaign — what is and isn’t true
There is an exam-free university route (DOCUMENTED): Azad University and state universities run a no-Konkur admissions track for foreign nationals twice a year, and the University of Tehran alone reported 457 Afghan students in December 2025. But be precise: this is the fee-paying international-student track open to all foreign nationals, and Afghan students have long complained of the opposite — a minimum-GPA bar that locks them out of free public places, and promised scholarships that weren’t paid (IranWire, 2022). Fully-funded government scholarships do exist and, per the regime’s own education portals, prioritise “Islamic and neighbouring countries.”
The social-media content portraying Afghans and Iraqis as model citizens or encouraging Afghans to move to Iran: ALLEGED — I have not found a verified, attributed campaign. If you have screenshots with account names and dates, that’s a thread on its own. Without them, don’t assert it. What is documented is that Al-Mustafa University’s network and the “students and pilgrims” framing are the recruitment pipeline — so any organised “study in Iran” outreach to Afghan or Pakistani Shia youth deserves scrutiny on those grounds.
7. What this adds up to
Iranian-citizen fertility has collapsed to ~1.47, and to ~1.0 in the capital. The map is right.
The provinces still above replacement are poor, rural, and Sunni or ethnic-minority — the population the regime represses, not the one it cultivates. The “immigrant provinces = high birth rate” story is wrong and should not be made.
Underneath the citizen numbers, foreign-national births rose 70% in five years to roughly a tenth of all births — a second, younger, faster-growing population the state tracked and the map likely doesn’t show.
The regime then expelled nearly three million of them. It was never a population policy.
What it kept — and rewarded with residency, pensions and Qom burials — is a Shia militia class of Afghan and Pakistani families numbering in the tens of thousands.
That class, plus Iraqi PMF units, is now documented on Iranian streets doing what Ghazanfarabadi promised in 2019: holding the Revolution when Iranians won’t.
The Islamic Republic is not being out-bred by migrants. It is being out-lived by its own people — and it has already decided who it will arm when they stop obeying.
Sources
- @BirthGauge, 20 Aug 2026; methodology reply crediting @HsynSyd75182 and citypopulation.de
- Iran 2016 census / ISPI, “Afghan Community in Iran: Five Decades On” (Feb 2024)
- Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Afghan Refugees in Iran” (UNHCR/BAFIA 2006–07 breakdown)
- Khabar Online / Asr-e Iran, 29 Feb 2024 — Ministry of Health birth data by mother’s nationality, 1396–1400
- Aftab News — deputy health minister on foreign-national share of births
- MEFDA (Ministry of Health cultural affairs), Jan 2022 — Qom University of Medical Sciences on non-Iranian births
- Iran International, Sept 2023 — Jomhouri Eslami Kavar hospital report; Aftab News commentary
- Tabnak, Sept 2024 — Afghan population / electoral composition warning; Statistical Centre 97% figure
- Stanford Iranian Studies, “Iran’s Population Dynamics” — provincial TFR 2011; Abbasi-Shavazi/McDonald (ANU) and UN DESA — provincial TFR 1998–2000; World Bank case study (2010) — contraceptive prevalence
- Tehran Times, Oct 2021 — provinces above replacement
- Minority Rights Group — Baloch in Iran
- IOM Afghanistan returns updates 2025; CNN 11 Jul 2025; Amnesty 17 Dec 2025; Mixed Migration Centre Jan 2026; Center for Human Rights in Iran Jul 2025
- MEI (Jan 2017), Jamestown, GlobalSecurity, Diyaruna (Dec 2020), USIP/ResearchGate “Fatemiyoun Army: Reintegration” (2019), Afghanistan journal 5.1 (2022) “Citizen Martyrs”
- Anadolu / Eurasian Times (Zainabiyoun); Iran International, Apr 2024 / Jan 2026 (Pakistan designation); US Treasury, 24 Jan 2019
- FDD Long War Journal, 13 Oct 2025; FDD, 9 Jan 2026; Jerusalem Post, 18 Jan & 10 May 2026; Iran International, 7 Jan 2026; NCRI, 6 Apr 2026
- IranWire (Mar 2022) on Afghan students; YJC via Khabarban (Dec 2025) on University of Tehran Afghan enrolment; Heyva Group on Azad no-Konkur foreign-national admissions
A version of this was first published on X on 22 August 2026. Read the original.