People between countries: where Kazakhstan's migrants were born and where people born in Kazakhstan live, 1990-2024

Abstract

This paper uses the United Nations International Migrant Stock, which counts people by country of birth, to describe how Kazakhstan's migration ties changed between 1990 and 2024, and checks every result against the previous edition of the same data. In the 2024 edition, people born in Russia made up 62.5% of the 3.29 million foreign-born residents of Kazakhstan in 1990 and 26.4% of 2.09 million in 2024, while people born in Uzbekistan grew from 164,039 to 744,161 and have outnumbered those born in Russia since 2015. Among people born in Kazakhstan who live abroad, Russia's share fell from 73.9% to 47.2%, and Germany has been the second country of residence in every year from 2000, with 896,268 people in 2024. The 2020 edition gives a very different picture of who lives in Kazakhstan: in it, people born in Russia still made up 66.3% of the foreign-born in 2020, and the share born in the four other Central Asian countries rose only from 3.9% to 8.6%. Russia's falling share and Germany's second place from 2000 among people born in Kazakhstan hold in both editions, but the size of the fall, the comparison with the other Central Asian countries and the shift in the origins of Kazakhstan's foreign-born residents depend on the edition. The author's expectation that Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan would be the second country of residence is not supported. Her explanation, given after a hint about the resettlement of the Volga Germans in 1941, that Germans forcibly resettled to Kazakhstan later returned to their ethnic homeland, is consistent in size with German statistics on resettlers.

Keywords: international migration, migrant stock, Kazakhstan, Russia, Germany, Uzbekistan, Central Asia, data revision

Список литературы

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Как цитировать

Aripkhan Zere People between countries: where Kazakhstan's migrants were born and where people born in Kazakhstan live, 1990-2024 // Central Asian Scientific Journal. – 2026. – No. 4(32), Vol. 2. – Pp. 152–160.

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