Since the early 1980s Iran has been host to one of the largest refugee population in the world. The overwhelming majority of refugees in Iran are Afghans who despite their religious and linguistic affinity with Iranians, experience multiple obstacles on their path toward integration. For the most part various dimensions of their plight have been addressed by anthropologists, sociologists, medical scientists, and students of religious studies (see for example, Iranian Studies, special issue on Afghans, 40:2, 2007). Systematic governmental policy studies however, have been far and few in-between (Rajaee, MEJ, 54:1, 2000). This paper attempts to address this imbalance by focusing on the approach of the Iranian government towards refugees. Iran has been frequently lauded for its leadership in hosting refugees. The latest accolade came from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Tehran. (See the daily Independent, 16 March 2017). However, and despite the constancy of the refugee challenge, the Iranian government has yet to formulate a stable and clear policy towards its Afghan refugees. The Islamic Republic’s refugee approach has historically fluctuated from open-door to closed borders, and from integration to repatriation. This paper identifies three factors consisting of ideological, structural, and strategic, as the central determinants of Iranian governmental approach to its refugee problem, and argues that the relative prominence of each of them has been the function of domestic, regional, and international changing circumstances, causing the fluctuations in policy towards the refugees. Ideological factors were more prominent at the beginning of the life of the post-revolutionary state while structural (economics) and strategic factors assumed prominence as time passed. The paper also argues that ideological factors were the primary determinant of the open-door policy while structural (economic) and strategic (security) factors, each to a differing degree, were the propellers of a stricter approach. The conclusion of the paper is that domestic, regional, and international trajectories are such that the trend toward stricter refugee policy will likely continue for the foreseeable future.