Participants of a roundtable organized by the Migration XXI Century Foundation and the Union of Journalists of Russia tried to answer the question why migrants have become a trump card in the election campaign in Moscow and how to combat the growing interethnic tension in society.
As often happens, for experts dealing with a certain topic, the main task was to separate facts from myths. So, Director of the Center for Migration Studies Dmitry Poletaev focused on the widespread belief that migrants take jobs away from local residents. In this regard, he noted that there is no serious competition for jobs between migrants and locals. For the most part, working migrants usually apply for different jobs than Moscow residents do.
"We must understand that unemployment is always structural and newcomers from other regions and from abroad usually apply for different jobs than those that Muscovites apply for," said Poletaev. In addition, the expert noted that "Russians have low mobility." And this, together with the factor of a reduction in the working-age population in Russia, is also a big problem. In particular, Poletaev referred to a study in which unemployed Muscovites and residents of the Moscow region were asked what salary they would agree to go to the Far East. According to him, most replied that the salary should be at least 80 thousand rubles.
In this regard, Poletaev considers the statement that "internal migration can fill some gaps" in the Russian labor market to be a myth. One can add to this what the author of these lines wrote some time ago. Namely, according to FMS data, only in Moscow there are at least 1 million Russians from other regions today.
Speaking at this press conference, the Executive Secretary of the Public Advisory Council under the Federal Migration Service of Russia for Moscow, Director of Projects of the Foundation for Development of International Relations "Dobrososedstvo" Yury Moskovsky believes that in reality this figure could be one and a half to two times higher. So those Russians who have shown mobility and activity in finding work outside their region have already done so long ago. However, this has not solved the problem of staff shortages, for example, in Moscow.
Senior Researcher at the Institute of Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yulia Florinskaya noted that in the capital today, according to official data from Rostrud, there are 170 thousand various vacancies. In particular, 3,800 janitor vacancies remain unfilled. Moreover, as Florinskaya told a Rosbalt correspondent, the real figures of the need for labor in the capital are much higher, because "this is only what employers have submitted to the employment service." At the same time, she noted that "no more than 30-40% of employers" submit their vacancy data to the employment service.
That is, Moscow actually lacks about 400 thousand workers. Those who unleashed the latest anti-migrant campaign in the country are apparently not interested in how to solve this serious social problem. Meanwhile, under this campaign, another set of tightening laws and regulations were hastily adopted.
Thus we have a paradoxical situation. Moscow needs 400 thousand workers. We cannot solve this problem using internal labor resources. Foreign labor has been suffocated. Today, it is difficult for a foreigner (except for a very thin layer of so-called highly qualified specialists whose official annual salary is millions of rubles) to get a job legally in the Russian capital.
But this is only one side of the migrant-phobic policy being pursued in the country today. There is another. The same Poletaev reminded the audience that if anything holds together such a, in his words, "dead entity" as the CIS, "existing mostly on paper", it is precisely those money transfers of migrants from Russia to their homeland.
At the same time, refuting another common myth, he noted that for every dollar sent home by a migrant, "4-5 dollars remain in Russia." Another participant of the press conference, leader of the Forum of Migrant Organizations Lidia Grafova, citing the head of the FMS of Russia Konstantin Romodanovsky, reminded the audience that migrants create 7% of Russia's gross domestic product.
Those gathered could not help but raise another important topic of today's migration – the responsibility of employers for illegal exploitation of foreign workers, which is often accompanied not only by lower wage rates, violation of basic working conditions, but also by turning migrants into powerless slaves.
However, most of those present could not recall when any employer was punished for such crimes. So, Chairman of the Committee "Civil Assistance" Svetlana Gannushkina reminded that law enforcement agencies have not moved forward for almost a year on the high-profile case of the use of slave labor in a grocery store in the Golyanovo district of Moscow.
According to Gannushkina, for many months after civil activists and journalists freed twelve slaves, both men and women, from the hands of slave owners who had forced them to work in that store for years, the prosecutor's office and the Investigative Committee "have still not investigated this case seriously." In her opinion, the owners of the store, who used slave labor and sadistically punished their slaves, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. "We have a corresponding article in the Criminal Code," she said.
However, the cart, as they say, is still there. Which is understandable in general. Gannushkina reminded that the local police actually "protected" the owners of this store. Policemen several times simply returned the female workers to the slave owners, women who tried to escape from there and seek justice at the local police station.
So, whichever problem of modern migration in Russia you take, you inevitably run into the economic, law enforcement, and political systems of the modern Russian state, without changing which there is no point in talking about any positive changes in this area.
Alexander Zhelenin,
«Rosbalt».