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Characteristics of labor migration from the Kyrgyz Republic
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Labor Migration as a Major Source of Employment and Development
Despite current data limitations in capturing migration from the Kyrgyz Republic, available data indicate that emigration from the Kyrgyz Republic is widespread (see box 1.1). There are currently no centralized administrative data that capture the full extent of labor migration from the country. Only the State Border Services have a registry of all Kyrgyz citizens and foreigners that enter and leave the country, but without clear distinction of the purpose of the travel, be it tourism, education, labor, or other. The lack of specific registry of labor migrants can be understood in a context of increasing free mobility of Kyrgyz nationals to the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan, the two main destination countries that are part of the Eurasian Economic Union, and the limited services provided by the Kyrgyz government for prospective and current migrants, as opposed to other migrant-sending countries with more mature systems, such as the Philippines. Available estimates from other sources, however, indicate that labor migration from the country is widespread. Estimates from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) migration database report that about 750,000 Kyrgyz citizens lived abroad in 2019.
Migration from the Kyrgyz Republic is heavily concentrated in one destination country. By country of residence, the broad definition of Kyrgyz emigrants by UN-DESA statistics shows that close to 80 percent reside in the Russian Federation (slightly below 600,000 people), followed by 10 percent in Germany (around 77,000, which are mostly ethnic Germans that migrated in the 1990s, taking advantage of the German nationality law that granted citizenship to anyone with proof of German ancestry) and 4 percent in Ukraine (about 27,000). The geographical composition of short-term/temporary migrants found in surveys in the Kyrgyz Republic, such as the Kyrgyz Integrated Household Survey (KIHS) or the Listening to the Citizens of the Kyrgyz Republic survey, is even more concentrated, with about 95 percent working in the Russian Federation (table 1.1).1 Several reasons explain the predominance
