Roughly 30,000 people annually emigrate from Armenia
By Rashid Shirinov
The trend of leaving Armenia forever is becoming increasingly popular among the citizens of the country.
The demographic catastrophe in Armenia has reached such a scale that the country’s official services can no longer conceal it. They admit that the population of Armenia is steadily declining and trend is constantly growing.
About 30,000 people annually emigrate from Armenia since 2002, head of the State Migration Service Gagik Yeganyan told reporters after the government meeting on May 4.
Yeganyan admitted that “the socio-economic and political causes of emigration cannot be ignored.” The official affirmed that Armenia has serious problems that the government cannot cope with.
The most doleful emigration statistics is about the younger generation of Armenia. Over the past six years, the country has lost about 35,000 students and the record outflow was registered in the capital Yerevan – almost 13,000 schoolchildren left abroad.
Moreover, schools are being closed in the regions, especially in the poor ones. One of the reasons for this is that parents sometimes cannot find money to buy clothes and school supplies for their children, so they don’t go to school.
Chief of Armenia’s Passport and Visa Office Mnatsakan Bichakhchyan has recently told reporters that 1,190 people have applied to the Passport and Visa Department of the Armenian Police for the renunciation of their citizenship in the first quarter of 2017.
Although Armenia’s population exceeded 3.6 million when the country gained independence in 1991, currently the number of people is even less that 3 million – it makes 2,981,500 people, while non-official statistics and experts argue that the figure is around 1.6 million.
Due to the social and economic problems in the country, people in Armenia don’t want or financially can’t afford to have children. The birth rate for the first 3 months of 2017 decreased by 6.5 percent as compared to 2016, and the mortality rate, on the contrary, grew by 3.8 percent.
At this rate, Armenia can literally turn into an abandoned desert in the near future.
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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov
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