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Paper abstract:

One of the important tasks of Kazakhstan's internal migration policy is to ensure the regional and demographic balance of the country's development. To achieve this goal, over the past 10 years, the Government of Kazakhstan has adopted 5 state programs and projects aimed at stimulating the rational resettlement of Kazakhstanis, the resettlement of citizens from labor-surplus regions to labor-deficient ones. However, despite the intensification of internal population movements, the issues of adaptation of migrants in Kazakhstan remain poorly studied. In this paper, based on 24 in-depth interviews, the results of a sociological study of the migration and adaptation processes of residents of the southern regions of Kazakhstan in the northern regions of the country are presented.

The study revealed that, depending on the socio-resource characteristics, goals and results of migration, as well as plans for the future, migrants can be divided into 3 main groups: the first group - resource strong - are those for whom migration is a development strategy; resource weak – those for whom resettlement is a survival strategy. The third group consists of migrants, who by their characteristics belong to both groups: as in the case of the second group, their main goal is to acquire their own housing and gain official regular employment, but in the long term, as representatives of the first group, they focused on expanding income sources and involvement in secondary employment.

In other words, in the case of the first group, we are talking about socio-economic push factors, in the second – about the attractive nature of internal migration. In the third group, the same importance of both push and pull factors is noted.