Migrants and ethnic color blindness

By Vestnik Kavkaza

"Moscow really needs migrants, about a million people. But the question is, what kind of workers do we need?”, the Acting Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, said yesterday. “The jobs mostly need to be taken by etnic Russians who came from nearby regions, or Ukrainians, Belarusians who speak fluent Russian and have Slavic traditions".

Deputy Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor Vladimir Zorin, largely agrees with Sobyanin: "Russia, like many other countries, suffers from a lack of personnel, and, foreign workers are able to fill this niche. The country's economy is in need of labor, and Russia should not interfere with the flow and increase in the number of migrant workers in its territory. It is necessary that the people who come to work share Russian traditions and study the Russian language. "

Based on the statistics of criminal offenses in Russia, against the background of more than half a million crimes only about 50,000 of them are committed by foreign workers. "The figure is rather big, but compared to the total amount - this is a" drop in the bucket. " The problem is that every crime committed by a migrant very quickly appears in the media and is blown up to epic proportions, which leads to an increase in ethnic tension. And it is very important that the Russian policy is aimed at settling and smoothing of such processes”, Zorin said.

Meanwhile, according to professor of the Institute of Public Administration and Law, chairman of the Public Council of the Federal Migration Service, Vladimir Volokh, "Russia is an acceptor in the sense of migration. At present, there are about 5 million migrants here. They come with different goals. Much of them just come for a visit. We have tourists, businessmen, sportsmen. But there are also migrant workers there. And the point is that we should reduce illegal immigration, and everyone who comes should be guided by the legal field that exists here in Russia. By the way, the absolute majority is guided by these rules. Raising the issue of banning the entry is fundamentally wrong. Migration will always exist. By the way, if we recall the 1990s, when the Russian state was established, we recorded in the Constitution that anyone can legitimately enter and be located in the territory of the Russian Federation. And probably none of us wants Russia to be a closed country, as it was before. On the contrary, we welcome all who come to us, but legally and in accordance with applicable law. "

At the same time, according to Vladimir Zorin, "migration has become a kind of" Trojan horse" of aggravation of interethnic relations. We all underestimated this and, frankly, in the recent years we have acted separately in the sphere of international relations and in the field of migration policy. It turned out that these issues are closely related. The reasons are numerous. One of them is ethnic color blindness. This applies to all, especially to law enforcement which is facing migration, both internal and external, daily. The most typical case of recent times occurred in St. Petersburg, at the train station: a Russian citizen from Tuva was stopped. The police officer asked him for documents. He showed his passport. The police officer said suspiciously: "I do not know such a federal subject. This is a fake passport" The person was arrested. While we do not carry out the country's ethnic and cultural literacy (that always existed in the Soviet Union, even in the Russian Empire), not going to understand what Russia is, what peoples are living here are, what the difference between a citizen and a non-citizen is - not only hair color or eye shape, but culture, other issues, I think we will wander for a very long time in these wilds. "


According to Zorin, "migration policy, if we are talking about its concept, doctrinal level, is adequate to the current situation." Responsibility for the elimination of illegal immigration is on the police, employers and local governments, "Neither Moscow nor the Kremlin and the White House can provide a place in the market or in the cemetery, and "rubber flats" are not created here. All this takes place in real life. And in this very real world we have some punctures in the implementation of the migration policy and its doctrinal level. "