Migration Governance in the BRI Era: China, Kazakhstan, and the Reshaping of Cross-Border Mobility

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has reshaped migration governance in China and Kazakhstan between 2013 and 2025. Announced in 2013, the BRI rapidly generated large-scale cross-border population mobility alongside its infrastructure and capital networks. Yet existing scholarship has focused predominantly on infrastructure construction, capital flows, and geopolitical competition, leaving the governance of cross-border mobility unexplored. This study addresses this gap by reinterpreting the BRI as a transnational mobility facilitator project and subjecting it to systematic comparative analysis from the perspective of international migration studies. The study is grounded in historical institutionalism as an analytical lens and employs the development-security paradox as its core theoretical concept. It employs a comparative-historical analysis (Lange 2013) and a qualitative research design (Creswell 2007), treating the China-Kazakhstan BRI migration governance relationship as an embedded single case study with within-case comparisons across temporal phases and collaborative positions. Empirical material draws on primary policy and legal documents, semi-structured interviews conducted across BRI-related mobility sectors, and fieldwork at project sites. The central argument is that both China and Kazakhstan transitioned from border-centric migration control models toward what this research terms stratified openness. It is a governance regime that selectively facilitates certain categories of mobility, project-based labor, expert personnel, and educational exchange, while maintaining or intensifying controls over others through digitalization, biometric registration, and security screening. To balance developmental demands and security needs, both states navigate technocratic calibration, enterprise-mediated governance, and the strategic management of governance visibility. At the meso-level, China reformed its migration regimes around selective openness and the incorporation of migration into the broader national governance framework. Kazakhstan developed a dual-track approach that balances public demands for labor-market protection with the practical flexibility required for BRI cooperation. At the micro level, everyday bureaucratic encounters reveal how governance frictions generated at the project level feed back into policy adaptation across the initiating and partner states. This dissertation contributes to migration studies in the following aspects. First, it extends migration state theory to non-Western developmental contexts, offering an alternative explanation of migration and governance dynamics in non-traditional migration receiving states. Second, it provides one of the first systematic analyses of migration governance interaction between China and a Central Asian state in the BRI era, contributing empirical grounding to an underexplored regional dynamic. Third, it bridges macro-level policy analysis with micro-level fieldwork evidence to demonstrate how policy change operates across multiple scales of governance.