By Vestnik Kavkaza
Alexei Zhuravlyev from United Russia and liberal democrat Sergey Zhigaryev presented a bill to the State Duma, which requires criminal liability to employers for hiring illegal migrants or violation of restrictions on involving them into certain activities.
The initiatives will hardly make easier life of migrants and the society which they try to integrate in. However, according to experts, religious organizations can encourage the process.
The general director of the Institute of Regional Problems, Dmitry Zhuravlyev, believes that the “experience of Western countries shows that the main problem is the motivation of the migrants themselves. Motivation of the state is working poorly. The main form of motivation is culture. A person should know why he needs to integrate in the society. Our Western colleagues couldn’t solve the problem, even though they invested into settlement of the problem more than the whole Russian budget. They didn’t succeed because they didn’t use the most powerful information resource – religion…We can forbid, permit, buy, and sale, but we cannot influence souls. And the role of Russian Muslim organizations is very important in this sense. They are those who can explain to a person how he can remain a Muslim and live normally in a different religious space, a different cultural space.”
According to senator Ruslan Gattarov, “people are indignant with visible uncontrollability of migrant flows by the authorities. When an electronic migration card which is developed by the FMS works in a full scale, we would know who a person is, why he has come here, when, and where he used to work..The Russian Muslimism should support these people. It is important to do it together with municipal authorities because people should be integrated into the Russian cultural space, rather than Muslimism.”
The head of the Center of Migration Policy Studies of Russian Academy of State Service, Victoria Ledenyeva, thinks that “a big role is played by informal social nets. All social transactions which includes employment, adaptation, learning the language, health issues are settled by migrants through informal social nets. Due to the nets poor speaking Russian is not an obstacle for a migrant. He can avoid state structures which deal with migrants’ problems because migrants solve the problems through ethnic Diasporas. Therefore, on the one hand, there is enclaveness, i.e. migrants get whatever they need from Diasporas; at the same time, it compensates lacking of official infrastructure.”
According to Ledenyeva, “about 40% of migrants come to Russia to settle here forever. Up to 60% of migrants are ready to learn Russian because they understand that speaking Russian will encourage their adaptation. However, not all migrants can afford attending the courses – the main reason is absence of time for learning the language.”
The expert thinks that “the mass media policy should be directed at establishing a positive image of a migrant. We should perceive migrants not as an evil, but as a good without which Russia cannot live today. The bilateral process of integration will encourage cultural diversity and tolerance in the society… A system of private employment agencies for migrants would have an access to a foreign workers employment base on certain professions.”
