The road home: the role of ethnicity in the post-Soviet migration

This paper argues the importance of ethnic affinity in determining migration patterns using a newly constructed late- and post-Soviet dataset. The members of various indigenous ethnic groups, who had been spread across the Soviet territories, had to decide whether or not to leave the land in which they suddenly became diaspora after the dissolution of the USSR. The migration literature conventionally claims that potential migrants respond to the economic differentials between source and destination, but the post-Soviet case reveals that ethnicity also played a crucial and independent role in migration decision and destination choice. The trend of ethnic un-mixing is evidently seen in the novel dataset regarding the regional migration patterns of major ethnic groups in the post-Soviet space. Econometric analyses using this dataset also confirm that ethnic composition of a region, along with labour market conditions, has significant effects on the regional migration patterns.