The state quota for the return of ethnic Kazakhs to Kazakhstan will enlarge to annual 15,000 families in 2005-2007, Chairman of the Migration Committee at the Kazakh Labor and Social Security Ministry Zhazbek Abdiyev said at a press conference in Alma Ata on Tuesday. He said the enlargement of the quota by 5,000 families a year resulted from the governmental plans to increase the population of Kazakhstan to 20 million by 2015. “The quota aims to help the organized return of those who cannot return to their home land because of poor financial status or old age,” Abdiyev said. It is planned to provide oralman families with free accommodation instead of giving them money to buy housing, he said. More than 59,000 families or 300,000 people have returned to Kazakhstan within the past 12 years under the national oralman program. Most of oralman families came from Mongolia, Turkey, China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Kazakhstan has a population of 15 million, and more than 4 million ethnic Kazakhs live in about 40 countries. President Nursultan Nazarbayev spoke about the return of ethnic Kazakhs to their native land for the first time in 1992, and the first oralman families came to Kazakhstan from Mongolia later in the same year. The quotas were introduced later to give material aid to returning Kazakhs, and returnees were called oralman. (Itar-Tass)