Russia urgently needs to attract immigrants over the coming years to avoid labor shortages, the country’s top migration officer said Monday.
“Even if we manage to stabilize or increase the population by raising the birth rate, the only source for increasing the labor force for the coming 15 to 20 years will be migration,” Federal Migration Service head Konstantin Romodanovsky told Interfax in an interview.
Romodanovsky said that the Kremlin had ordered him to keep migration stable at about 300,000 people per year and that this number should include ethnic Russians from abroad, highly qualified foreign specialists and promising youths.
The figure of 300,000 immigrants was formulated by Vladimir Putin in a programmatic newspaper article in his presidential campaign one year ago. Critics have voiced serious doubts about its feasibility, arguing that the government’s past attempts to lure Russian speakers and qualified migrants to the country have seen little success.
Romodanovsky warned that according to official data, the country’s population is expected to fall from the current 143 million to 139.3 million by 2030. “It is problematic to refuse to attract foreign workers and to focus exclusively on your own labor resources when those are strongly declining,” he said.
Read more: Russia Needs Immigrants, FMS Chief Says | News | The Moscow Times
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