A new immigration policy in Azerbaijan

Abstract

Up to the late 1990s, discourse around mass emigration from Azerbaijan had to do, above all, with mass post-Soviet labour migration. During the last two decades (1990-2009) 266,000 arrived in the country as permanent migrants and 707,500 departed from Azerbaijan according to official statistics. According to official statistics the balance of migration was negative for Azerbaijan (though never massively negative) almost every year. But in the last two years more people arrived in the country than left it. On the grounds of these figures the authorities announced that Azerbaijan has become attractive for immigrants. President Ilham Aliyev’s stated: “The number of foreigners intending to visit the Republic of Azerbaijan will increase while Azerbaijan is developing. This can be considered a positive factor for our country. However, we must prefer the interests of our state, people, citizens and this must be the priority for our migration policy” on the home page of the Internet Site of the “State Migration Service of Azerbaijan Republic” in fact, there is the official declaration of changes in the migration process. These ideas have been set in state law in the “Decree by the president of the Azerbaijani Republic on the use of the ‘single window’ principle in the management of migration processes” (4th of March 2009).