Iranians Go to Turkey to Seek U.S. Visas : U.S. Embassy Inundated With Requests, but Few Are Approved

Early in the morning a line begins forming at the heavy steel fence surrounding the American Embassy in Ankara. By 3 p.m., it is chaos.

Young men elbow past elderly men in skullcaps. Mothers hold babies in one arm, the other clutching the fence to hold their place in the swaying crowd.

Nearly seven years after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Iran in the wake of the hostage crises, thousands of Iranians are now trying to get to the country labeled “The Great Satan” by their government.

“They must help us,” said a medical supplies dealer from Tehran who was educated in New York. “It would be so much easier if the Americans would open a branch visa office in Tehran.”

About 25,000 Iranians have applied for tourist or temporary visas to the United States at U.S. consular offices in Ankara and Istanbul so far in 1985. Most have been rejected.

“There is no crying need for an Iranian family to go together to an unspecified state to visit an unknown doctor about a minor disease or injury,” said a consular official. “We even had a man come in demanding an instant visa because his child had fallen down the stairs of his hotel in Ankara. We started seeing similar cases for several months, then that ‘disease’ went away.”

Other Iranians attempt to prove they are students at U.S. universities. There is a brisk trade in blank university documents sold to those in the embassy lines.

A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington noted that of 11,000 people granted refugee status by the United States in 1984, 7,400 were Iranian.

“Mostly they were Bahais or Jews,” groups known to be persecuted in Iran, the INS spokesman said. Other Iranians must individually prove persecution to gain refugee status, and few have the family ties or special skills that would allow them to enter the United States as official immigrants.

Once in the United States, foreigners on tourist visas have other routes to legitimacy, including marriage to an American.

“We have a lot of fraudulent marriages,” the INS spokesman said, “And Iran is one of the countries that does have a history of such marriages.”

There was a time when hundreds of Iranians struggled across rough mountain passes from western Iran into eastern Turkey and appealed to international institutions for asylum.

Today this “underground railroad” is all but unused. Virtually all Iranians now entering Turkey are legal passport holders who have in effect received Tehran’s blessing to travel.

“It is as if the authorities in Tehran had set up a huge passport printing machine and were giving away documents to anyone who asked for one,” said a foreign diplomat in Istanbul.

U.S. diplomats in Washington say they have no specific information on why Iran has opened its floodgates. But theories include a need for the foreign currencies sent back by Iranian workers and a desire to get rid of malcontents.

Finding a country willing to accept Iranians is harder.

“Everyone is afraid of us,” said Mahoud S., from Tabriz. “All people think of when they meet an Iranian today is “refugee” or “Islamic Jihad.”