How and where to get work permits for foreigners in Kazakhstan

11 July, 2019 15:49

Kazakhstan has improved its position in attractiveness for foreign migrants, rising from the 129th to the 77th place in the last five years. One of the factors of Kazakhstan's attractiveness is the opportunity to find a job. Kazakhstan has 17 Migration Service Centers, regulating foreigners’ working process within our country. Read more about the activities of the Centers in the review by the Strategy2050.kz Information Agency.

It’s obligatory to have a work permit

Last year alone, Kazakhstan issued over 434 thousand and extended 117.5 thousand work permits to citizens of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. About 260 thousand permits for migrants to carry out labor activities with individuals have been issued and extended for 6 months of this year.

The number of people who want to get a work permit especially increases in the spring-summer period, when up to several thousand permits per day are issued.

Where to get a work permit?

Work permits are issued by the Migration Service Centers. The first Migration Services Center in Kazakhstan was opened on January 12 last year in the capital city – Nur-Sultan. Today there are 17 such centers in the country, operating in the cities of Nur-Sultan, Almaty, Shymkent, Atyrau, Uralsk, Petropavlovsk, Aktobe, Kostanay, Kokshetau, Aktau, Karaganda, Kyzylorda, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Pavlodar, Taraz, Turkestan and in Almaty region (Ili district).

How to get a work permit?

The main purposes of the Centers are to improve the provision of public services to foreigners who have arrived in our country, to create conditions for them and to reduce the time for obtaining a labor patent for work. In other words, this is the process of withdrawing “from the shadow” guest workers and their involvement in the official working environment.

The Centers provide more than 10 types of public services. They include:

- obtaining and renewing a work permit;

- obtaining a visa;

- citizenship issues;

- registration for a permanent place of residence of foreigners by the Migration Service;

- obtaining an Individual Identification Number (IIN); a certificate of insurance, an individual migration number and a medical certification.

For registration, a migrant must provide his valid document proving the identity of the foreigner or stateless person with a visa to enter and stay in Kazakhstan, a migration card with a mark about crossing the border, and also fill out an application in any form.

For registration of service recipients, the period of temporary stay of which is more than six months, two completed arrival address sheets are additionally provided, a completed registration certificate for the arrival sheet, a photo of 3.5 * 4.5. The deadline for the provision of public services is 1 business day.

The creation of the Migration Service Centers brought the provision of public services to foreign citizens to a new level. Previously, migrants had to spend from three to five days to get and renew work permits, now this process is carried out through the migration PSCs for two hours.

Computerization of services

The Centers have a visa-migration web portal, where foreigners could be temporarily registered online. For this, the receiving party must have a digital signature. Every year the number of services rendered by the Migration Service Centers will increase.

“At a meeting on the issues of digitization of the internal affairs bodies, Minister of Internal Affairs Yerlan Turgumbayev ordered to speed up the transition of the state services to an electronic format. In this regard, digitalization processes have begun to be successfully implemented in the Migration Service Centers”, the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kazakhstan reported.

It should be noted that the MSCs were created as a part of a larger initiative of state services automation by the non-commercial joint-stock company “Government for Citizens” State Corporation.

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