Assessing the impact of migration from Central Asian countries to birth rate in Russia

The current demographic crisis in Russia poses a challenge to the country’s socio-economic well-being. To handle the crisis, the government implements various demographic policy measures; some of them focus on migration as a way to maintain population stability. The largest share in Russia’s migration gain belongs to citizens from CIS countries. Most of them come from Central Asia, whose countries have a high birth rate. These trends suggest that newcomers start families in the Russian Federation, and migration contributes to the birth rate of the host country, which is estimated in the article. The contribution of migration from Central Asian countries to Russia’s birth rate is analyzed as an indicator reflecting the proportion of the number of births by women from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan in the total number of births in Russia. The empirical base for the research includes three sources of statistical data reflecting an integrated approach to determining migration status: data on place of birth, citizenship and ethnicity. We find that 1.5% of children born in 2011-2023 in Russia are descendants of citizens of Central Asian countries; 0.5% of children born in Russia as of the critical moment of the 2020 census are descendants of Kyrgyz, Uzbeks and Tajiks; 11.1% of children have foreign-born parents (born outside the territory of the Russian Federation). Birth rate in foreign-born persons in Russia is also differentiated by federal districts. Subsequent research on this subject can focus on the dynamics of fertility in mixed families, and include statistics on RF constituent entities.