Over 150,000 Chinese arrive in Kazakhstan in three years

Over 150 thousand Chinese citizens have visited Kazakhstan over the past three years, head of the Migration Police Department of Kazakhstan Interior Ministry Serik Sainov said in an online-conference at Tengrinews.kz. Arrival of 48 thousand Chinese citizens was registered in Kazakhstan in 2011. 6 thousand of them committed different violations, including one crime; 42 Chinese were deported from the country, Sainov said. 65 thousand Chinese arrived in Kazakhstan in 2012. They committed 3 thousand violations and one crime; 54 people were deported. Since the beginning of 2013 the number of Chinese citizens who registered their temporary stay in Kazakhstan made 38 thousand people. 1,804 people were brought to administrative liability, 22 were deported and 3 committed crimes. Answering the question about the share of Chinese citizens in the flow of visitors to Kazakhstan, Sainov said that it was not high. According to him, over one million foreigners get registered with the migration police every year. And only about 60 thousand of them are Chinese. Besides, the majority of Chinese citizens registered for a temporary stay in Kazakhstan are ethnic Kazakhs. “Kazakhstan requires that foreign nationals, including Chinese, obtain visas to enter its territory. Private, business and tourist visas are issued for limited periods of time, this helps the interior authorities monitor this category of foreigners. 4-5 thousand Chinese citizens are hired in Kazakhstan and in its joint companies, mainly in the oil sector, every year,” Sainov added. There are currently over 25 thousand foreigners, including the citizens of China and Turkey, working in Kazakhstan, the official said. He added that the quota for foreign labor in the amount of 1.2 percent of Kazakhstan's economically active population (around 108 thousand people) was approved for the year 2013. “There are 25.6 thousand foreign citizens working under the issued work permits, which is 0.28 percent of the economically active population of Kazakhstan. Most of the foreign laborers come from China (5,903 people, 23 percent of the total foreign labor), Turkey (3,359 people, 13.1 percent), India (1,106 people, 4.3 percent) and Great Britain (1,502 people, 5.9 percent),” Sainov said. Foreign workers from Central Asian countries are mainly employed in the informal sector, he said. That’s why most of them work without any work permits. “To counter this problem we are constantly performing checks and taking preventive measures,” Sainov added. 62 thousand violators of the migration legislation have been detected since the beginning of 2013. Half of them are citizens of Uzbekistan. 2,368 of the foreigners were deported from Kazakhstan. Besides, 1.5 thousand employers who hired foreign labor without work permits were brought to administrative liability, he said. “There are currently 167.7 thousand foreigners residing in Kazakhstan. They include 28.6 thousand people from non-CIS countries, 139 thousand people from CIS countries and 6.9 thousand people without citizenship. The total number of permanently residing foreigners includes 54.8 thousand (26.8 percent) of ethnic Kazakhs, 139 thousand (47 percent) CIS citizens, 28.6 thousand (17 percent) non-CIS citizens, including 2,227 Turks, 1,818 Germans, 440 Israelis , 256 Pakistanis, 310 South Koreans and 480 Afghans,” Sainov added.