IRANIAN IMMIGRANTS’ LIVING CONDITION IN RUSSIA AND TURKEY DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

COVID-19 has emerged in a world tightly related to local and international population movements. International migrants are a group of very vulnerable people who are directly and indirectly affected by Covid-19. They face additional barriers rather than the locals, such as language barrier, border closure, visa barrier, etc. The aim of this article is to discuss impacts of Coronavirus COVID-19 on Iranian immigrants’ lives in Russia and Turkey. The 1979 Islamic Revolution led to unprecedented numbers of Iranians leaving their home country. Although many Iranian have immigrated to both countries in the last decades, the forms and patterns of migration of Iranians to these two countries are different. And Turkey has been one of the main countries of destination for Iranian immigrants and it also acted as a transit country for Iranian refugees that left Turkey to Europe. And Russia on the other hand, in the last years, hosts Iranian students who form the most number of immigrants in this country. The qualitative approach, grounded theory is used in this research. We interviewed four Iranian immigrants in Russia and three Iranian immigrants in Turkey online in platform zoom in the Persian language, the age range of our interviewees was from 18-35 years old, two of the interviewees were women and five men. Findings in this study show that language barrier, financial instability, access to information, and in some cases discriminations have been the most important problems that Iranians faced during the pandemic in these two countries. However, they believe that the two countries were quite successful in adapting themselves to the new pattern of life.