Critics warn that the new institution centralizes power under Khamenei’s apparatus, enabling deeper exploitation of foreign workers and streamlined recruitment for Fatemiyoun and Zainebiyoun forces.
The Iranian regime’s creation of the National Migration Organization marks a significant consolidation of power over foreign nationals in the country—a move that critics describe not as reform but as a bid for deeper exploitation and the strengthening of Tehran’s proxy militias, including Fatemiyoun and Zainebiyoun. Amid mounting internal crises, the regime has introduced a new bureaucracy designed both to extract more revenue from vulnerable communities and to reinforce its regional military apparatus.
The organization is intended to bring all policymaking regarding foreign nationals under one centralized authority. On November 24, regime MP Ali-Asghar Nakhaei Rad told ISNA that the new body would absorb responsibilities previously held by the Foreign Ministry and regime’s law enforcement, turning itself into the sole decision-maker on issues related to immigration and residency. His remarks emphasized that the regime could “use the capacities of foreign nationals within the country’s needs,” a statement widely perceived as a bitter irony in a country where more than twenty million citizens are unemployed and millions of graduates have been pushed into perilous jobs such as fuel smuggling and cross-border porterage.
Nakhaei Rad further claimed that work permits for foreign nationals would now require approval from the Ministry of Labor, a ministry that has long failed to create even minimal stable employment for Iranians. Observers argue that this shift merely masks the regime’s long-standing policy of replacing hungry and dissenting Iranian labor with cheaper Afghan and Pakistani workers, whose vulnerability makes them easy to exploit.
For years, networks linked to military institutions and municipalities have used foreign nationals as a form of modern-day slave labor—paying minimal wages, denying basic protections, and generating high profits for regime-affiliated mafias. The establishment of the National Migration Organization, critics say, functions as a cover for these exploitative policies and offers a deceptive façade for a deeply entrenched system of economic and political abuse.
While regime officials insist that the lack of a unified immigration body has caused “challenges and threats,” critics argue that the real threat to the authorities is not the presence of foreign nationals but the rising anger of the Iranian public. The regime’s narrative omits a critical dimension: the role of the IRGC Quds Force in recruiting thousands of Afghan and Pakistani nationals into the Fatemiyoun and Zainebiyoun brigades with promises of residency or under threats of deportation. Many were deployed to Syria and Iraq, where they were injured, killed, or returned home disabled. Their monthly pay—around 400 dollars—was dispensed alongside threats against their families, creating a coercive system of military servitude.
The National Migration Organization is expected to institutionalize and streamline this process. By centralizing all foreign-national files directly under the offices of the regime’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and the IRGC, the regime will be able to more easily expand recruitment for proxy militias, channel profits to military-linked patronage networks, and exert greater control over populations that have little capacity to resist.
This shift comes at a time when millions of Iranian workers struggle to survive on wages far below the poverty line. Against this backdrop, the regime’s assertion that foreign nationals are being deployed to meet “national needs” rings hollow. The needs being served are not those of the Iranian people but those of a ruling structure dependent on cheap labor, expanded security apparatuses, and regional military interventions.
The National Migration Organization thus represents a new mechanism in a decades-long system of exploitation, coercion, and militarization. Critics warn that it is designed to produce a new generation of modern-day labor slaves and disposable proxy fighters. As with the cases of Fatemiyoun and Zainebiyoun, time will expose the underlying purpose of this institution: the continuation of a predatory and militarized policy that once again places ordinary Iranians—and vulnerable foreign nationals—in the crosshairs of the regime’s political and economic ambitions.
