Moscow’s New Changes in How Immigrants are Counted Behind Reports Their Actual Number is Increasing at Unprecedented Rates, ‘To Be Precise’ Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Feb. 13 – Rosstat has just reported that in 2024 a record number of immigrants came to Russia, but that figure is an artefact of how Moscow gathers and counts information about arrivals than it does any actual changes, Danya Gurbanova and Ilya Klimkin of the To Be Precise portal say.
    The two journalists point out that Moscow now counts as immigrants people it did not count as such earlier such as students and uses electronic rather than paper reports about their number and the number of those in other categories (tochno.st/materials/v-2024-godu-v-rossiiu-vieexalo-rekordnoe-cislo-migrantov-kak-minimum-za-poslednie-26-let-veroiatno-eto-sviazano-s-izmeneniiami-uceta).
    Demographers with whom Gurbanova and Klimkin spoke say that it is impossible to make comparisons before of data sets before and after these accounting changes and to tell exactly how large any distortions introduced are. That will be possible only if Rosstat releases more information than it has up to now.
    They base their conclusion on several cases over the last two decades where widely reported changes in the number of immigrants to Russia had less to do with changes in the actual number than changes in the way data about them were gathered and then collated and reported. But they call for caution in any use of new data sets until more is known about them.