Along with its Baltic neighbors Estonia and Lithuania, Latvia received its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, the country's main migration issue has been the status of its 1.1 million Russian-speaking residents, the legacy of the Soviet Union's Russification policy in which millions of people were removed from their homelands and sent to other parts of the territory.

Ethnic Russians make up nearly 30 percent of the country's population of 2.4 million according to Latvia's 2000 census, while only 1.4 million are ethnic Latvians; the rest are Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. Due to demographic trends, ethnic Latvians' share of the population has been decreasing, another cause for government concern.