Migrant students from Kazakhstan: fact or fiction? (the case of Tomsk)

It is not rare that some terms and concepts are filled with the meaning which is not reflective of reality - the fact that makes the very use of them questionable. In most cases, this happens "thanks to" various actors involved. The terms "student migration" and "migrant students" have become part of the Russian academic discourse in the first half of the 2000s when implications of the demographic crisis started to be felt and spread into higher education. It is then that the first academic research works by demographers and sociologists exploring some problematic issues of that phenomenon started to appear. Migration researchers place "student migration" among migrations "by objectives", which here implies "moving to a place of study" (L.L. Rybakovskiy). Then the question arises: to what extent foreign students identify themselves as "migrant students"? Our hypothesis is that the concept of "migrant students" does not reflect the real situation in education as there is a significant number of foreign students who do not think of themselves as migrants per se. Students from Kazakhstan are also included in the "migrant students" category. Based on individual semi-structured interviews, we have investigated the pilot group of students from different parts of Kazakhstan - East Kazakhstan being the main exporter of them - who study at universities of Tomsk. The aim was to study the self-identification of the students in relation to the concept "migrant students", or otherwise, to find out if they consider themselves to be part of the student migration movement to Russia. There have been thirty interviews taken in total, the analysis of which revealed that the percentage of those students from Kazakhstan who do not see themselves as "migrant students" along with those whose self-identification with this concept is not stable, is higher than that of students confidently considering themselves as "migrant students". The main reason why students from Kazakhstan consider themselves as "migrant students" is the formal movement from the one country to the other with the aim of getting educational services, although these same informants do not deny the similarities in the socio-cultural space of both countries and the absence of any language barrier. All the students interviewed had never thought about their having the social status of "migrant students" prior to the interviews but, having analyzed their empirical experience, they drew a conclusion that de facto (and this is worthy of particular attention) they are "migrant students". Another factor contributing to their feeling of being "migrant students", on a legal level this time, is the migration card to be filled in by all foreign citizens when entering the Russian Federation wherein one has to indicate the purpose of migration.

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