LONG a human dumping ground, Kazakhstan is used to mass shifts of population. Josef Stalin sent his enemies to gulags on the steppe, and during the second world war deported millions of people there: Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Meshketian Turks and others. Even when some were allowed to return home after his death in 1953, 2m Russians and Ukrainians were brought in to turn the harsh steppe into farmland. Kazakhs were a minority in their homeland.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, about 800,000 ethnic Germans and more than 1m Russians left the newly independent Kazakhstan. The population fell from 16.5m in 1989 to 14.9m in the late 1990s. But these days, as economic meltdown has turned to oil-fuelled boom, the human flow has reversed. A World Bank report now ranks Kazakhstan as the world's ninth-biggest destination for migrants.

Kazakhstan is still an exporter of people, mostly ethnic Russians and Germans returning to their homelands. But it has started to draw large numbers of migrants from the impoverished neighbouring Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and above all Uzbekistan, as well as a few from the frontier regions of Russia and from China. They work mainly on building sites, as well as in tobacco and cotton fields and in the bazaars.

Russia, the world's second-largest recipient of migrants, continues to be the country of first choice for Central Asians, but its appeal is waning thanks to the open discrimination against non-Russians. Kazakhstan is closer and enjoys, in the south, a warmer climate. Its people are seen as more tolerant and their language, Kazakh, is closely related to Kyrgyz and Uzbek.

Politically, the regime remains authoritarian. But it has pursued market reforms and these, combined with the development of oil reserves once neglected by Moscow and high oil prices, are transforming Kazakhstan. Its economy has grown by close to 10% a year since 2000. There are an estimated 400,000 illegal migrants among a population of 15.2m.

Economic growth is changing Kazakhstani attitudes. In the south, it has become almost the norm for Kazakh farmers to keep Uzbek servants to work their land. In the view of Yekaterina Badikova, of the International Organisation for Migration in Almaty, Kazakhstan's biggest city, some are in effect kept as slaves.

The government is trying to lure these armies of Gastarbeiter, the German word commonly used for the migrants, out of the shadow economy. At the end of 2006, the Ministry of Interior completed a five-month pilot programme during which over 160,000 migrants were legalised. This was a third more than they had expected and brought in more than $8m in taxes.

Just a few years ago, Kazakhstanis were tickled by the news that two dozen freezing Sri Lankans had been detained by police in the middle of winter after wandering aimlessly across the snow-covered steppe in the north of the country for four days. They had been dumped there by traffickers and told they had arrived, as they had been promised, in Germany. These days traffickers might no longer need to lie. As a destination for migration, Kazakhstan is good enough for many.