Fewer Migrants Came to Russia in 2018 than in Any Year in the Post-Soviet Period

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 9 – Only 124,000 migrant workers arrived in the Russian Federation last year, the smallest number in the post-Soviet period and one that will fall far short of covering the natural decline of the population of the country, according to experts at the Russian Academy of Economics and State Service. 

            The number of arrivals fell by four percent compared to 2017 while thee number of migrants departing Russia rose 16.9 percent, the experts say. As a result of this accelerating decline, migrants covered only 57.2 percent of the natural decline of the Russian population (vedomosti.ru/economics/articles/2019/04/08/798624-chislo-migrantov-rossii).

            The number of immigrants from all countries except Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkmenistan declined in 2018; for those three, the rise was insignificant. The largest declines involved Ukraine and Uzbekistan previously major donors. Indeed, , had it not been for massive immigration from Ukraine after the events of 2014, the overall decline would have begun then.

            In 2019, the experts at the Russian Academy of Economics and State Service say, immigration may increase slightly but the number will still be less than 200,000 and still not cover the natural losses of population.  Rosstat is somewhat more upbeat: it says there will be 208,000 immigrants next year and that their number will rise to 281,600 by 2035.

            But even that official statistical agency says that “not in a single one of those years will this migration growth compensate for the natural decline in the population,” Vedomosti reports. That means the optimism the Kremlin has expressed about demographic recovery as the economy improves is unlikely to be justified. 

            Moreover, the experts say, what migrants there will be will increasingly be from Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East rather than from culturally similar areas like Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova whose peoples increasingly look to move to Europe rather than to Russia for work. And they will be low-skilled workers who cannot substitute for the declining  Russians. 

             And that in turn means that the harder the Kremlin pushes for immigration to fill the positions the declining Russian population can’t, the greater the cultural divide between the migrant workers and the indigenous populations will become and thus the potential for conflicts rise, again exactly the reverse of what the Kremlin hopes for and has predicted.