Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 6 – Migration from
Russia’s regions to Moscow has had one impact that so far has attracted little
notice: it has boosted birthrates in the Russian capital while reducing them in
the regions from which the migrants come, a combination that understates the continuing
demographic challenges facing the Russian government.
Writing in “Gazeta,” Alla Tydynk, a
researcher at the Russian Academy of Economics and State Service, notes that
recent increases in birthrates in Moscow which are the result of the influx of
migrants have come at the expense of birthrates in the non-Russian areas from
which the migrants come (gazeta.ru/comments/2014/10/30_a_6283469.shtml).
They thus tend to make the
demographic situation look better if increasingly challenging for the still
predominantly Russian capital and less threatening to the center as a result of
the way in which outmigration has slowed the growth in the increasingly Muslim
regions of the North Caucasus and the Middle Volga.
In-migration to Moscow not only more
than compensated for the decline in the numbers of indigenous Muscovites over
the last 15 years, but it also had the effect of reducing the average age in
the capital, thereby increasing the share of Moscow women in prime
child-bearing age cohorts and increasing the percentage of those who were
migrants, Tyndyk says.
What is happening becomes clear, she
continues, if one examines figures for those born in the 1970s. There are now “about
800,000” of these in Moscow, of which only “a few more than 500,000” are
natives of the city. According to the last census, this cohort bore about a
million children. Of these, immigrants were responsible for 40 percent.
About 100,000 of the migrant
children now live outside the borders of Moscow, but 300,000 of “the children
of new Muscovites have become residents of Moscow” and are likely to remain
there. In “greater Moscow” which includes the surrounding oblast, the
disproportion of migrant children to the offspring of indigenous groups is even
greater.
Polls show, Tyndyk continues, that
the migrants want two or three children, far more than native Muscovites do,but
that in fact, their fertility rate is only slightly higher than that of the
Muscovites, 1.4 children per life time per woman for the generation born in the
1960s than 1.3 for native Muscovites in the same cohort.
Thus, the Moscow scholar says, “the
young internal migrants are having a favorable impact on the demographic future
of Moscow,” but they are doing so “at the expense of the regions” from which
they came because their exit has reduced the number of women in this cohort
there.
But
if Moscow is a winner in this competition in terms of demographic growth, it
now faces more burdens such as providing pre-schools, kindergartens and regular
educational institutions for the immigrant children, something the government lacks
either the funds or the will to do.
Unless
that changes, Tyndyk says, the lack of such opportunities will become “a
problem for the demographic well-being of Moscow,” one that can only be
addressed by taking into far greater consideration these demographic
differences among the various regions and republics of the Russian Federation.
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