Migration

        The policy implications are therefore straightforward. The costs of the large stock of illegal immigrants are large and growing. Hence, an immigration amnesty – in the very near future – is both unavoidable and welcome. The amnesty should be coupled with a transition to a pointbased system policy of admission for new legal migrants. The lack of data and research prevent the formulation of an optimalizing design for the point system and amnesty policies. But enforcement imperfections imply that both the amnesty and the point system must be structured in a very straightforward way. The case for microeconomic data collection is driven by the needs of policy evaluation and design. Without microeconomic data collection it is impossible to evaluate the impact of migration on labor market opportunities of

native workers, to understand the dynamics of migrants’ skill structure, to study temporary and circular migration, and so on, all of which are pre-requisite to a rational design of the point system. Coincidentally, the very immigration amnesty mentioned above would provide an excellent opportunity to create such a dataset to learn virtually everything needed to be known about migration in Russia, the collection of migrants’ data.

       There have been quite a few studies of migration based on Soviet and Russian statistics. Since 1960s, Soviet researchers have intensively studied internal migration flows; the data were quite accurate then, given the tight administrative controls in the Soviet Union. At that time, Soviet economists proposed two theories of migration, one considering labor-resource balance as the primary factor of migration while another supposed intra- and interregional differentiation of life conditions to be more important. Correlation and multinomial regression analysis based on cross-sectional republic- and region-level data revealed that economic conditions were relatively more important for migration than social characteristics. Average wage and real wage, capital investment, housing construction, and job creation had large significant influence on migration.

         Western scholars of Soviet migration also established the applicability of standard neo-classical economic theories and the traditional gravity model in the Soviet context and have shown that there was great market force influence from service sector development and investment. They have also demonstrated that command forces such as city growth restriction suppressed migration in Soviet period and (to a lesser extent) in the transition period.

Sociological literature on Russian migration also explored official data sources but recently has tried to rely on surveys of experts and migrants. An International ILO study held in 1997 was based on the survey of national and local level authorities who are specialists in the field of illegal migration and illegal employment in Russia.

       This study highlighted a need to redesign immigration policy as well as enforcement mechanisms. It also emphasized the importance of additional research on trends and geographical destinations of illegal migration, labor market consequences, and the evaluation of policy effectiveness.

 

 

Conclusion

 

    Both international and internal migration is important for Russia’s economic development and growth. International migration can help address the long-term demographic problems in Russia that are even more severe than those in Western Europe. Russia can benefit from skilled, working-age migrants from the former Soviet Republics, most of whom share similar cultural backgrounds and speak Russian. Moreover, the median Russian voter seems to be more tolerant in regard to foreign workers than the voters of Europe. However, the regulation of external migration has been inconsistent and ineffective. It is not clear whether the recent

tightening of migration rules has succeeded in reducing and regularizing migration flows. Due to enforcement problems, it seems to have shifted undocumented migrants into the shadow economy.

          Internal migration can also produce sizeable benefits, especially by alleviating large interregional differences and efficiently reallocating resources in the economy. Throughout more than a decade of economic transition, internal migration rates have been low, and there has been virtually no convergence across regions. Despite five years of fast economic growth, there remain regions with low income and high unemployment. If one assumes that the natural rate of unemployment is about 5.5%, Russia currently has about 2.3 million unemployed who should found jobs in equilibrium. This number is striking given that there are large regions with zero unemployment, and the average wage in Russia has been growing faster than productivity for a few years. The internal migration is therefore as important for the Russian labor market and, in turn, for economic growth, as international migration. The main obstacles to internal migration have been administrative barriers and the underdevelopment of financial and housing markets.

         Russian migration policy has been following that of developed countries who suffer from the same problems of an ageing population and need for immigrants in order to replenish the labor force. In these countries, the policy is often excessively repressive as it follows the sentiment of the median voter, who is low-skilled and therefore is afraid of competition in the labor market.

The negative attitude to migrants is also driven by the fear of dilution of cultural identity. Both issues are relatively less important in Russia. First, the policies serve high-skilled elites. Second, the vast majority of immigrants are ethnic Russians or Russian-speakers from FSU countries. Hence administrative barriers to migration turn into source of rents and bribes for officials and create a large pool of illegal immigrants.

 

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