Latvia: Study on practices in the area of regularisation of illegally staying third-country nationals in the Member States of the EU, Ref. JLS/B4/2007/05, Appendix B, Country Profiles of 22 EU Member States and the USA, Vienna: International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD)

Immigration to Latvia is a relatively new issue on the country’s political agenda. Latvia received its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, together with the recent post- EU accession emigration of free movement Latvian workers and the resulting labour shortage at home (e.g. Karnite, 2006), the country’s main migration issue has been the status of its 1.1 million Russian-speaking residents. The latter are a visible legacy of the Russification policy of the Soviet Union when millions of people were removed from their homelands and sent to other parts of the territory (Heleniak, 2006). Ethnic Russians make up nearly 30 per cent of the country’s population of 2.4 million according to Latvia’s 2000 census, while only 1.4 million are ethnic Latvians; the rest are Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians. Due to demographic trends, ethnic Latvians’ share of the population has been decreasing, another cause of government concern. (...)