Analytics, Demography, EU – Baltic States, Latvia, Society

According to the data released by the Central Statistical Bureau, around 17,000 people have returned to Latvia over the past four years and around 13,000 of them have remained in their native country. A third of the returnees have left again but their repeated remigration cannot be ruled out either, Mierina said. 

The researcher said that statistics do not support claims that more and more people emigrate repeatedly and fellow researcher Mihails Hazans' study shows that people's wish to emigrate has been declining lately, given that in 2016 around 40 of remigrants wanted to leave Latvia. 

"The situation is improving. A lot of people have returned to Latvia, therefore, the narrative that nobody is returning to Latvia has to change. They do return," Mierina said. 

Hazans, the author of the study assessing the size of the Latvian diaspora, said that obtaining precise data about the size of the diaspora in the world is very difficult but that based on the data obtained at the beginning of 2020, there are some 500,000 Latvians and former Latvian citizens, as well as Latvia-born people living in foreign countries. 

The figure also includes next generations of Latvian emigrants and people who consider themselves Latvians, Hazans said.