Putin’s New Migration Policy Directed at Preventing Ghettos rather than Boosting Russia’s Population

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – For most of his time in power, Vladimir Putin has promoted immigration to compensate for the demographic decline of the Russian nation, but now, in the new concept paper he has signed, he instead is focusing on security issues instead so that immigrants can continue to help Russia but not retain their identities or form isolated ghettos.

            That is the overarching conclusion of Novyye Izvestiya journalist Aleksandr Kumanyev who argues that “the new concept is not simple an edited version of the old but a complete change of paradigm (newizv.ru/news/2025-10-17/novaya-kontseptsiya-migratsionnoy-politiki-rossii-chto-ona-izmenit-438076).

            “If the previous version of the document adopted in 2018 was essentially economic and demographic, then the current one in the first instance is a document about security,” about ensuring that immigrants can still come and do the work but not act in ways that will threaten public order or threaten the values of the Russian nation.

            To achieve that, the commentator says, Putin has called for the introduction of a new and tightly controlled system of managing immigrants, laying much of the responsibility for doing so not on government agencies but on businesses that want to use the labor of migrants, and blocking the rise of concentrated settlements of migrants, otherwise known as ghetto.

            Realizing these goals will not be easy. On the one hand, businesses will be upset about these additional responsibilities and monitoring the migrants will be enormously expensive given their number. And on the other, if such a tight system is put in place, the number of immigrants likely to come will fall, pleasing many Russians but hurting the Russian economy.

             And despite the obvious shift from demographic and economic considerations to security and control ones, this new paradigm will likely have serious demographic changes as well, pushing down the number of migrants and thus exacerbating the downward trend of the size of the Russian population.