Iran had a secular, democratic government. It was overthrown by the UK and US who installed a brutal dictatorship just so they could get their oil cheap, so you can kind of see how Iranians might conclude that “democracy” isn’t worth the paper it’s written on and the only defense is a bigger bunch of bastards than the other guys’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
However, the "We" is ambiguous: US or EU? Or Canada, Australia, Japan?
The US is also an abberation: our immigration system favors family reunification ("chain migration") from a diverse pool of emigrant countries over economic migration. Most other countries heavily restrict immigration on the basis of family reunification. Diversity of origins is enforced through both per-country quotas as well as literally handing out green cards to people from countries that don't send us lots of migrants ("the visa lottery"). However, the primary effect of this is to make it very difficult for Mexicans to immigrate. I don't have detailed enough statistics to know if most Middle East emigrants immigrate to the US on work visas or through family sponsorship, but I would suspect that all of the above factors are a wash, as most of our immigrants come from Europe or the Americas.
Well, when your region of the world has been torn asunder by everything, including colonial powers, fascist reactionaries and nationalists, liberal market economies, and international communism; the only remaining cultural artifact that you can call your own is religion. If you want to unify the Middle East, you have to do so under the guise of religion, and in practice that means conservative religious extremism. Iran is sort of a microcosm of this: they deliberately adopted theocracy as any form of secular government or economy was viewed as surrender to one's oppressors.
The only problem is that there's at least three dominant forms of religion in the area to unify under: Sunni and Shiite Islam, and Zionist-compatible Judaism. This has more or less created a local cold war between Sunni theocracies (e.g. Saudi Arabia), Shiite theocracies (e.g. Iran and half of Iraq), and Israel. These hostilities are often fought with insurgencies, which means lots of violence in the border areas between the three religions. This is not a great place to live.
Immigration law is quite complicated and fraught. Every country has a mostly but not entirely irrational fear of demographic shifts (see Texas and Israel), and so they heavily restrict who can enter their country. However, the demands of capitalism mean that most countries have to provide a practical immigration path for college-educated individuals such as scientists. Immigration for the working class is generally disallowed or heavily restricted as a form of labor market protectionism, which means there is vast disparities in who is and isn't allowed to leave a country.
This creates an interesting problem: it is very difficult for these countries to convince educated scientists to remain in their country. Scientists generally don't get along with theocrats all that well to begin with. However, we've also chosen the immigration policy that is most likely to select for (relatively) liberal emigrants and filter out more conservative ones. So there's a vicious cycle: it's easier for scientists to leave the Middle East, which makes the region more conservative, which makes more scientists want to leave.