Thousands of People Leave Their Homelands Forever in CIS

The Russian Federation gave passports to 43,000 immigrants from Kazakhstan last year, Izvestiya edition reports.

Russia has made a new record for the last 15 years; this country gave passports to more than 656,000 foreigners. The vast majority of them were Ukrainians (62.4%), but newcomers also included 63,000 people from Tajikistan and 43,000 from Kazakhstan. Moreover, among new Russian citizens are also Germans, Americans, British, Canadians, seven people from Switzerland and one Japanese.

On the other hand, Kazakhstan still acts like a magnet for ethnic Kazakhs, who move from neighboring countries to their historical motherland. In 2020 about 13,000 Kazakhs came to the country. The total amount of such immigrants since 1991 is about 1.7 million people.

Most of them came from China (53.1%), Uzbekistan (31.3%), Turkmenistan (8.7%), Mongolia (3.7%) and other countries (3.3%).

The main destinations for those newcomers are Almaty region – about 51.3% of migrators now live here, Mangystau (13.3%) and Turkestan (5.6%) regions as well as the cities of Nur-Sultan (4.1%) and Shymkent (3.9%).