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Kyrgyzstan faces outflow of workforce

27 February 2013 12:43 (UTC+04:00)
Kyrgyzstan faces outflow of workforce

By Aynur Jafarova

Head of the Kyrgyz state-run Center for Employment of Citizens Abroad Nurdin Tinayev has said that each year about 700,000 citizens of Kyrgyzstan move to Russia.

This is a large enough figure for a country like Kyrgyzstan, which has 5.5 million population.

According to official data published earlier by the Kyrgyz government, 52 percent of the Kyrgyz population is currently out of the country, in particular in Russia.

Since the collapse of the USSR, Russia has become a country for immigrants coming from the former Soviet countries. Russia is now working to toughen migration rules to save jobs for its own citizens.

Russian communist MPs have already prepared amendments to the law on migration which envisages applying a visa regime to the migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

"We are absolutely sure that it is necessary to reduce the quota for migrants in the economy, there is enough workforce in Russia. We will insist on the application of a visa regime, firstly with the Central Asia countries," First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma [lower house of parliament] Committee on Nationalities, Valeri Rashkin, said.

Russian MP from the ruling United Russia party Dmitri Vyatkin also did not rule out application of a visa regime with the Central Asian countries and said tightening of the legislation would not involve the countries of the Customs Union (CU), which comprises Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia.

In December 2012, MP Almazbek Batirbekov expressed hope that Kyrgyz citizens would not face problems related to tightening of the passport regime in Russia after Kyrgyzstan becomes a member of the CU and single economic zone of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Now, former Soviet Union countries cross Russian borders without visas, but Baltic states, Georgia and Turkmenistan are an exception.

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