The politics of immigration control in Russia

Abstract

Despite a visa-free regime among all CIS countries, Russia has become increasingly restrictive in its policies regulating migrants" access to the labor market. In particular, Russia instituted a quota in 2007 that regulates how many work permits will be issued in each year. This quota has decreased dramatically since its institution and since 2008 has stood well below the actual labor needs of the Russian economy. The quota mechanism has been criticized by numerous experts in Russia for not being in line with labor market need, for being based on political factors more than economic prerequisites, and for having complicated feedback mechanisms between employers and government ministries. According to migration experts in Russia, quotas are "determined through a complicated and multilayered mechanism not backed by any serious methodology" (Ioffe & Zayonchkovskaya, 2010). The goal of this poster presentation is to assess the rationale and methodology for quota formulation set out in government documents. By assessing whether the methodology prescribed by the government is used consistently across regions and identifying potential gaps in the methodology, we can begin to assert whether the criticisms of the quota mechanism have merit and start to identify additional factors that need to be considered.