Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

In the Risk Pointers section last week, we looked at the poor welcome given by Russia to immigrants from Central Asia and pointed to the contradiction between this and President Vladimir Putin’s obsession with Russia’s demographic problems.  Of even more concern for the president will be the latest opinion poll showing how many Russians want to emigrate.

According to an opinion poll from the Levada Centre, 22% of Russians want to emigrate, up from 13% in 2009.  Among students, the figure is a colossal 45%.  The other categories with a high proportion of people wishing to emigrate are: entrepreneurs (38%), non-manual workers (33%), professionals and housewives (28%), men in general (24%), people under the age of 25 (39%), people in the 25-40 age bracket (32%), those with higher education (27%), those with a high consumer status (27%), and residents of Moscow and of cities with a population of 100-500,000 (28% each).

Factors that are motivating people to want to emigrate include: better living conditions abroad (49%), economic instability (32%), a secure future for children (31%), arbitrary actions by the authorities (18%), business conditions in Russia (14%), crime and insecurity (12%), lack of professional prospects (10%), and better medical care abroad (10%).  However, less than 1% of respondents said that they had gathered or already filed documents for emigration.

Coming back to the issue of immigration, on 11 June Putin admitted that Russia needed to be more flexible.  He said: "On the whole our policy in the migration sphere should be more flexible, certainly ensuring the rights of our indigenous citizens, but it should be more flexible so to attract labour resources…The government is working on this now."

He said: "We are willing to use well-trained foreign specialists, we are interested in the kind of workforce for which there is demand in industry, construction, the housing and communal sector, and the agro-industrial sector.”

However, he added: “These people have to be adapted to life in Russia, they have to know Russian, the history of our country and the basics of our legislation, they have to treat our traditions with respect.”  He also said: "Our decisions on combating illegal migration also have to be implemented in full, and this includes making the relevant laws tougher.”

This last comment reflects the continuing Russian ambivalence towards immigration.  This seems to be particularly the case with migration from Central Asia.  Last week we quoted the head of Russia’s Federal Migration Service, Konstantin Romodonavskiy, speaking out against migrants from Central Asia who “hang around” on the streets.  He told the State Duma that most migrants are from Central Asia, under the age of 30, and “don’t know Russian and don’t have any skills”.

Yet Putin, in his remarks on migration this week, said that Russia did not have as “serious and dangerous” a problem with immigration as Europe and the US because most people coming to Russia were from the former Soviet states “and generally know some Russia and have a common mentality and historical memory”.

The Russian president also said on 10 June that enhancing “Eurasian integration” was a key priority for Russian foreign policy.  He said: “A most important priority is promoting partnership with our closest neighbours, the CIS [former Soviet] countries, enhancing Eurasian integration in the framework of the Customs Union and Single Economic Space, and creating the Eurasian Economic Union by 2015.”