МИГРАЦИОННОЦЕССЫ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ РОССИИ

Abstract

During the last fifteen years migration has become one of the most emphatic issues in Russia alongside with the ones, which have lately been included into four Russian national Projects. The flow of immigration turned out to be so strong that it became almost impossible to put the whole migration process under statistical control. The statistics of Russian immigration is of a “scattered” character and varies from 5 to 12 million people who during that period came to live in the country both legally and illegally. The questions related to the Russian immigration issue and which are usually posed at frequent public and academic discussions within the country may be interpreted as follows: What are the reasons of intensive immigration into post-soviet Russia? What are the factors that stimulate the immigration process? Can Russia juggle both – the powerful immigration flow and the accomplishment of national Projects? Is immigration instigating further inter-ethnic tension and religious confrontation? These as well as many other questions and doubts usually come to the surface when discussing the immigration issues. This paper is dedicated to identifying the approaches which are offered by the social and political sciences in understanding the migration process with all its advantages and drawbacks. Demography, for example, looks upon migration as a necessary element for sustaining the population dynamics; demographers consider this process as a very positive solution for the countries (including Russia) which have lately been experiencing some dangerous mismatch between birth and death rates. Due to that kind of disparity the annual reduction of population in Russia has reached 0.65 percent, and the natural loss amounted to 10 million people. With all these facts taken into account, demographers would ascertain that migration is a real blessing for some nations as well as inevitable process in the globalizing world. And this process, furnished with well-developed integration programs, is able to successfully solve a whole number of demographic problems in Russia. Economists, on the one hand, regard migration as a positive influence on the Russian work-force balance and thus a necessary means to developing country’s economy. But they, on the other hand, clearly understand some negative consequences of it: migration factor brings about changes in the interethnic balance, increases competition at the local labor and other markets, land ownership, creates financial burden for the local authorities as well as potential target group for organized crime. Jurisprudence is not only dealing with the negative sides of migration but also working out the necessary preventive measures to reduce the scope of law infringement. During the last several years Moscow signed a number of agreements on migration, the most important of which are with the European Union and Ukraine. Cultural analysis of migration makes it clear that the process is usually followed by interethnic tensions and collisions. Hidden cultural differences often make cooperation difficult. In many other cases immigrants are not at all prone to integrate into the mainstream of a foreign culture. Political paradigms or approaches offer their own perception of migration. Russian political realists consider the outside world as the grounds for continuous fight as well as part of global competition and perceive migration (directed both into and out of the country) as a serious danger to national security. The liberal paradigm does not share the concerns of realists about the dangers of migration flows. The liberals claim that Russia, as part of the globalized world, should not oppose or limit the migration process because this kind of resistance may bring about the isolation of the country and hamper its further development. The next political paradigm – globalism – is close to liberal understanding of migration, but the supporters of this approach go even further in their perseverance to “global civil society” and “global governance”. Specific perception of migration can be noticed in the attitudes of social constructivists who analyze the problems of migration in relation to the notion of national identity.