Decades of subsistence farming have curved 65-year-old Isa’s spine and turned his cheeks a rich, leathery brown. The white-haired father of seven obtained legal refugee status in Iran over three decades ago, fleeing war and crushing poverty as the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Two political regimes later, Isa must still stay off the main road when he rides his motorbike to work.

Under the intricate Iranian laws governing the lives of Afghan immigrants, refugees lack permission to own motor vehicles.

On the two-kilometer stretch of road that separates his rented brick cottage from the two-acre field where he plants kale, an old Afghan driver may pique police interest, with potentially devastating consequences for Isa and his family.

In late June, Isa’s nephew-in-law, Ali, 26, was detained while traveling to Ghazvin, a city northwest of Tehran, to see his wife’s family. He was sent back to Kabul. Although the address where Ali was registered is only 40 kilometers away, he did not have written permission from a local official to leave the district. Ali spent a hellish summer in Kabul, living in a dirt-floor hut with his relatives. He telephoned his wife and infant son every day, wondering who would provide for them if he was unable to find a way back to Iran.

Isa, whose four grown daughters and son still live with him in Ghazvin, has learned to avoid such mistakes. He is old enough to recall a time when Afghan refugees enjoyed the same welfare and benefits as needy Iranian citizens, and has struggled to adjust to the constantly evolving laws that restricted those privileges as his compatriots began flooding into the country by the hundred thousands, becoming the largest urban refugee population in the world.

As the cash-strapped Iranian government struggles to accommodate the estimated 3 million Afghan refugees living in the country, the smallest infraction is enough to get even documented immigrants deported. One year ago, Iran began implementing a plan to repatriate some 2.5 million Afghans by 2015. The strategy contradicts the current trend of Afghan migration, which has been rising steadily as renewed violence near the Durand Line displace civilians and Nato’s imminent withdrawal from Afghanistan heighten political and economic uncertainty.

Despite growing xenophobia and Iran’s own economic problems, many Afghans favor the difficult conditions in Iran to an unstable future back home. Faced with restrictions on property ownership, freedom of movement and access to government services, seasoned first-generation migrants like Isa constantly search for ways to circumvent the rules and allow their families to have stable lives.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An Afghan child looks on as Iran’s police stopped a group of illegal Afghan refugees at Kooleh Sangi in Baluchistan province in Iran, October 16, 2001. Photograph: STR/AP

Out of sight

Throughout his years of farming, Isa invested a majority of his meager income to sending his son and five daughters to school, even when the government policy of the day prevented it. The children of legal immigrants are entitled to the same education as citizens under Iranian law, and refugees from the north and west of Afghanistan adjust quickly due to strong linguistic similarities between Farsi and their native Dari. The last official figures from 2010-11 indicate an 8% annual rise in school enrolment among documented Afghan refugees. But mercurial government policies hinder Afghan pupils’ ability to attend school regularly, and many parents often turn to underground networks to ensure their children don’t fall behind in their studies.

“Despite all the help he needed on the field, my father always insisted on sending us to school,” recalls Isa’s daughter, Fatameh, 23. “But we were not always allowed to register by the start of the school year.” In 2006, when Fatameh was 14 years old, a new government directive rescinded the existing residence permits of Afghan refugees, and Isa’s daughters were unable to get new documents before the beginning of the school year. “We sat at home, crunching pistachios and watching the other children walk to school every day,” Fatameh recalls. “Finally, our father decided to take us kilometers away from our home, to a secret school for Afghans that was completely hidden from the eyes of the government.”

At the time, the family lived in Abyek, a small town some 60 kilometers from their current home in Ghazvin. The “school” where Isa brought Fatemeh and her sister Leila was a mud-brick hovel hidden in the hilly countryside, lacking plumbing and electricity. “I was always in love with this place, even if it was damp and dark, with mud walls, termites and kerosene heaters that blew smoke and fogged up the classroom air like a pipe-puffing old man,” Fatameh says. “Towards the end of that school year, the government suddenly remembered us and allowed us to legally attend state schools.” By then, most of the other Afghan children in Abyek had fallen too far behind to continue the school year, but those clandestine lessons allowed Fatameh and Leila to adjust.

While Isa’s daughters were able to continue their education, the Afghan refugees who were part of more recent immigration waves have not been as fortunate. In 2011, the Iranian government announced it spent $162 million annually to educate refugee students, but it still bans undocumented migrants from sending their children to Iranian schools. In recent years, as Iran’s population of illegal Afghan immigrants grew to 2 million and concentrated in urban areas around Tehran, Fatemeh remembered her own childhood experience. “I saw all these undocumented refugees whose children could not study and no one was accountable for them,” she says. “I got the idea of opening a school similar to the one I attended as a young girl.”

Together with her sister Leila, Fatameh rented an abandoned, roofless shack in Ghazvin from an orchard watchman who was friends with the family. Initially, the sisters only had one set of used books for each level, but eventually befriended a local teacher who provided them with redundant schoolbooks from her own classroom. Working in furtive shifts, they taught up to 150 students of various levels and ages at a time. Parents payed a small fee for each child enrolled, and the classes were large enough to secure the sisters’ small monthly salaries of up to $130. But the weather-exposed abode was not as out-of-the way as the bucolic school of Fatameh’s girlhood, and the sisters soon began having run-ins with local police.

“They intimidated us again and again,” says Fatameh. “Several times we were inside the classroom when they came in and locked the door behind them. They robbed the small girls’ jewelry and even sexually harassed them. Once, they crossed my path as I was walking to the school and started beating me. If some nearby watchmen hadn’t come to my rescue, I’m not sure what would have happened.”

The right credentials

Bullying and physical abuse accompany many Afghan children throughout their adolescence in Iran. Whether playing at recess or standing in line for bread at the naanvai, they hear jeers like “Go back to your country” and “Dirty Afghan” daily.

“I remember the Afghan kids were really ostracized at school, always standing in one corner because no one wanted to play with them,” says Asghar, 24, who grew up in an Afghan community in the Tehran suburb of Karaj, some 100 kilometers from Ghazvin.

An ethnic Hazara from the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, Asghar had a distinct advantage over his taunted classmates. “My face was different from the other Afghans, and the kids didn’t bother me as much because I looked more Iranian,” he says. This chameleonic quality offered Asghar other social opportunities denied to his Afghan classmates. At the start of eighth grade, his religious studies teacher encouraged him to sign up with the youth wing of the basij militia. Though his immigrant background deviated from the patriotic credentials typically associated with this hard-line political grouping, Asghar readily signed up, hoping the membership would help him keep his place in school.

The identification card was simple, and bore Asghar’s name, birthdate and photo embossed with the basij seal. It allowed the 14-year-old boy to access an exclusive world of evening gatherings, Qu’ran readings at the local mosque, even a religious field trip to Tehran during which their professor drew up the bus curtains to shield the young boys’ eyes from the sight of city girls in bad hejab.

But these adventures came to an end with the close of the school year, just as the young Basiji boys began signing up for armed combat training, a highlight in their teenage lives. The year was 2006, and much in the way of his peers Fatameh and Leila, Asghar was forced to interrupt his schooling as the government reevaluated the legal status of its expanding community of refugees. “They pulled all the Afghans out of school that year, and I could not participate in the combat training,” he recalls. “My sister, brother and I had to leave our studies and find work.”

Eventually, Asghar and his family moved back to Mazar-e-Sharif so that the children could continue their education. His sister recently finished high school, and his older brother is now a professor at the local university where Asghar just completed his undergraduate degree. He still considers moving back to Iran to study and work, but says that his family would not have enjoyed the same upward mobility if they still lived in Karaj.

Isa’s two eldest daughters have also moved back to attend tuition-free university in Kabul, while Fatemeh remains by his side in Ghazvin. She found a sympathetic headmaster who rents her a proper classroom but “takes no responsibility for what happens” if the police find out.

Isa, meanwhile, carries on with his simple farmer’s life as much as his arthritis and bad back permit. He worries for the safety of his daughters in Kabul and struggles to make ends meet as rents, agricultural costs and government fees rise with the pace of inflation. Often, he copes with pangs of homesickness. “I don’t have a homeland where I can live in peace, and Iran is not a country where I can have human dignity and respect,” he muses.

But at least in one way, Isa has succeeded. Fatameh’s modest teaching income covers tuition at Ghazvin University, where she studies education. College enrollment has allowed her to reach the holy grail of integration: She now holds a special passport that allows her to move freely between towns, provinces, even countries.

It is enough to break the cycle of hunger, legal restrictions and existential worries that plagued Isa his whole life, even if he himself is still prone to them. With little in the way of savings, Isa says he intends to work as long as he is able. Steering his motorcycle onto a tree-lined dirt road to avoid detection from the police, he heads back to work.

The Tehran Bureau is an independent media organisation, hosted by the Guardian. Contact us @tehranbureau. This article was originally published without a byline