Window on Eurasia

‘Cultural Distance’ Between Russians, New Immigrants Increasing

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 22, 2006 – Immigrants arriving in the Russian Federation
today are more likely than those who came a decade ago to drawn from
non-Russian nationalities, come from smaller cities or rural areas, and
have less education and fewer skills, according to a demographer at the
Russian Academy of Sciences.

And these trends, which have already increased “the cultural
distance” between native-born Russians and immigrants far beyond what
it was earlier, will only be exacerbated if Moscow seeks to use
monetary incentives as the primary means of attracting additional workers from
the former Soviet republics.

That is because, Elena Tyuryukanova says in an interview carried in the
current issue of Moscow’s “Polititicheskiy zhurnal,” those most
likely to respond to financial incentives will be even less Russian,
urban, and skilled than those coming now
[http://www.politjournal.ru/preview.php?action=Articles&dired=96&tek=6051&issue=172].

Tyuryukanova, a senior scholar at the Academy’s Institute of
Social-Economic Problems of Demographic Problems, says that at present
some 70 percent of those arriving in the Russian Federation come not
from the capitals or other major cities of CIS countries but rather
from small cities or rural areas.

On the one hand, she continues, that means that these people are
typically less well educated and less adapted to Russian-dominated
urban culture. And on the other, it means that an ever-increasing fraction of
them is interested only in making money quickly and then returning to
their homelands.

“Now on average,” she says, “only 25 percent of immigrants intend
to settle in Russia and plan to remain for a long time” – although
she acknowledges that in the city of Moscow, that figure may be as high
as 40 percent. But even that latter figure is much lower than was the
case with immigrants to the Russian Federation in the 1990s.

Unfortunately, she continues, neither the Russian authorities nor those
frightened by an influx of immigrants have fully taken this new reality
into account. But they will soon be forced to by a combination of
economic growth and declines in the number of new entrants to the
workforce born in the Russian Federation.

Another problem for which the authorities have not yet found a
solution, Tyuryukanova says, is the failure of immigrants to go where they would
be most useful. It would be a good thing if they could be distributed
by some kind of quota system across the country.

But the Moscow demogrpaher points out, there does not seem to be any
good way of doing that. And consequently, immigrants will increasingly
be concentrated in areas where they can earn the most – and then they
will depart when they can make more money elsewhere.

That pattern in turn makes defining “compatriot” – a Russian term
for those linked one way or another to the Russian Federation or
Russian nation – extremely problematic, Tyuryukanova says. And it suggests
that Moscow should be spending more attention to other issues.

Specifically, Tyuryukanova continues, “a great deal more [can and
should] be done” to overcome the country’s demographic problems by
“developing infrastruicture for the life and normal conditions of
work on the territories [of the Russian Federation] that are losing
population.”

Appended to the interview with Tyuryukanova are the comments of three
other leading Russian specialists on demographic issues. Galina
Vitkovskaya, a specialist on labor issues, said that Moscow should
develop special labor exchanges to link immigrants to employers so that
this part of the labor market would become more transparent.

Olga Chudinovskaya, another Moscow demographer, called for improving
legislation governing the registration of immigrants in order to make
the law less cumbersome for all involved but not as liberal as human
rights advocates have called for lest chaos result.

And Andrei Pozdnyakov, who advises President Vladimir Putin on
demographic issues, made two other remarks worhy of note. On the one
hand, he said that there had never been as many as 25 million
compatriots, the number that Putin and other Russian officials have
routinely invoked.

On the other, he said, “the problem of migration policy was a special
case of the state’s ethno-national policy.” And that broader policy
in turn, he argued should be developed in such a way as to protect
“the rights of each [citizen or immigrant] regardless of
nationality.”

 

Latest Window on Eurasia stories | Religion Archive | Islam in Russia and CIS Archive | Orthodox Church in Russia and CIS Archive | All Window on Eurasia Stories Archive |