By Vestnik Kavkaza
The Russian International Affairs Council and the Federal Migration Service signed a cooperative agreement during the conference titled “International migration processes: trends, challenges, prospects.”
Andrey Kortunov, Director General of the RIAC, noted that several regional schools of studying migration were established in the best universities of the country. In this situation, an important step could be the integration of the migration theme into plans for study for humanitarian professions.
The head of the FMS of Russia, Konstantin Romodanovsky, expressed hope that the books headlined “Migration in Russia. 2000-2012” and “The Migration Field of Russia” published by the RIAC will help the FMS employees to deal with economic, social, and legal aspects of modern migration processed.
Igor Ivanov, president of the Russian International Affairs Council and the editor-in-chief of “The Migration Field of Russia,” says that “on the one hand, migration is challenges and threats; on the other hand, it is resources for development. This is a headache for officials of all countries, but it is a common cause for a state, a society, the mass media, and civil society institutes. In the end it is our routine life and we face it at work, in shops, and in the streets. Of course we can discuss the dynamics and geography of migration processes for a long time. However, most of experts think that migration scales will extend, while attempts to hold these processes will fail. During the current decade about 1 billion people have changed their place of living. At the same time, there is no country which could say that it has found a perfect strategy of management of migration flows. There is more successful experience and there are obvious failures, but in the end we all learn how to manage migration in the modern world; and unfortunately, the process of learning is not easy and it has to be constant. Of course for Russia migration issues are sharpest. There is no an aspect of migration theme, which wouldn’t touch on our country. Both immigration and emigration are important for us, transit and refugees, returning compatriots and accepting forced migrants, labour migration, and educational migration. Even though Russia has been a crossroad of migration processes for many centuries, many things are discovered as new today, we have to learn from our foreign partners.”
According to Ivanov, the voluminous work “Migration in Russia” is our mutual attempt to sum up the complicated and sometimes painful processes of establishing of the migration strategy in Russia in the early 21st century. This process involved federal state structures, Russian regions, our expert society, and numerous NGO and the mass media. It was difficult to choose texts for this book. On the one side, we wanted to present the widest diversity of views and approaches to the migration problem; on the other side, we wanted to avoid thoughtless, tendentious, and politically dependent materials. Did we succeed? It’s up to readers to decide. We hope this work will be demanded in universities, academic institutes, and state facilities. I started with universities not accidentally. I think this subject must be taught in universities, if not in schools, because everybody will face this problem, despite his or her profession.”
