The head of state's request addressed to the Federal Assembly the other day to as soon as possible correct the new law "On Citizenship," which has been in effect for less than a year, is not only an admission by the president of his own mistakes, but also a kind of apology to millions of compatriots abroad, writes Vremya Novostey. After all, it was precisely on the initiative and under pressure from pro-presidential factions that the State Duma adopted the law "On Citizenship" in 2002, which tightened the conditions for obtaining a Russian passport. At the same time, the coercive component of migration policy strengthened - the service dealing with the affairs of newcomers was transferred to the subordination of the Interior Ministry "to establish order." In the heat of building the migration "vertical," the Kremlin ignored the arguments of its opponents - mainly from right-wing parties. Now the president in his message literally quoted the deputy chairman of the Yabloko party, Sergei Mitrokhin, who warned a year ago that the new law "On Citizenship" "actually creates a barrier to the inflow of human resources, which are needed primarily to solve economic problems and demographic issues." Vladimir Putin admitted that the laws that "were designed to bring order to migration flows and make them transparent" do not contribute to solving these tasks, but rather create serious problems for a large number of people.
Lawyers who help compatriots from neighboring countries obtain Russian citizenship believe that representatives of diasporas during Putin's recent trips around the CIS finally managed to convey to the president the real picture of what is happening in embassies and OVIR offices. "Five years with a residence permit, three years waiting for a residence permit, and everywhere a terrible permit system, checks, long periods for reviewing documents. Therefore, even those who seemingly have grounds to obtain Russian citizenship (for example, born on Russian territory) can now do so only through a court procedure," said Sergei Sychev, a consultant at the law firm "Aksenov & Partners." Today these human tragedies are not even surprising in their absurdity. For example, a Moscow State University lecturer from Belarus who has lived in Moscow for almost 20 years after graduate school, who asked not to be named, believes that Putin was speaking also about him as "a person without citizenship in his own country."
"These people who came to us, lived and worked in Russia, participated in its political life, many of them served in the Russian army," the president said in his address, emphasizing that more than a million people who came to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the adoption of the new citizenship legislation found themselves in an extremely difficult life situation. Vladimir Putin called on parliamentarians to correct the law as soon as possible. "We need not prohibitions and obstacles, we need an effective immigration policy," he stressed in his address.
But demographers and human rights activists believe that efficiency cannot be achieved by mere corrections to the law; it is necessary to review not only normative acts but also adjust the overall migration policy, changing its coercive vector to an economic one. "In principle, the law 'On Citizenship' corresponds to international norms," explained Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, head of the laboratory for analysis and forecasting of population migration at the Institute of Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "But conditions in Russia do not correspond to international norms. Migrants are a matter of our national income and economic growth rates. First of all, we need preferences and a simplified registration procedure for people from former Soviet Union countries, if we do not want jobs to be occupied by people from Asia."
Given the Kremlin's latest moods, the demographers' aspirations may be realized. Moreover, in addition to the "blundering" Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Labor also claims the role of conductor of the state's migration policy. In any case, the head of this ministry, Alexander Pochinok, was one of the first to respond to Vladimir Putin's speech and stated that "Russia already needs additional labor today, and after a few more years, due to unfavorable demographic forecasts, this problem will become even more acute." The minister spoke in favor of "simplifying the filling of emerging vacancies by citizens from neighboring countries" and proposed not just abolishing the quota system for foreign workers from CIS countries, but also making Russia's labor market open. Moreover, Alexander Pochinok immediately demonstrated how this could be done by signing an agreement with his Azerbaijani colleague Ali Nagiyev on cooperation in training social personnel and pension provision for foreign workers in both countries.