Migrants will arrive without a pilot – Economics – Kommersant

The Ministry of Labor proposed to suspend the pilot project, under which citizens of Uzbekistan could enter Russia under a simplified procedure to work at construction sites, in the agro-industrial complex and light industry. Representatives of the construction industry note that the “pilot” helped to compensate for the shortage of workers during the pandemic, but now it is already necessary to move on to optimizing procedures for attracting foreign labor in general. The Uzbek authorities believe that the cancellation of the experiment will not reduce the recruitment of citizens of this country to work in the construction industry of the Russian Federation.

A draft government decree prepared by the Ministry of Labor on the suspension of a pilot project to attract labor migrants from Uzbekistan to the Russian Federation is published on the portal regulation.gov.ru. Recall that during the pandemic, in October 2021, the Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of Construction and the Ministry of Internal Affairs announced the start of testing a new mechanism for admitting foreign labor into the country. As part of an agreement with Uzbekistan, 10 thousand citizens of this country were allowed to enter the Russian Federation to work in the construction industry and at agro-industrial enterprises – then light industry was added to them, and the headcount ceiling was canceled. To comply with sanitary and epidemiological standards, labor migrants underwent medical examinations, PCR testing and vaccination on the territory of Uzbekistan. The project was aimed at solving the problem of labor shortage – against the background of the outflow of migrants due to covid restrictions, it then grew to 2 million people.

As the Ministry of Construction explained to Kommersant, after the removal of restrictions, including on crossing borders, the continuation of the project in its current form is “not entirely advisable.” As part of the “pilot” for work in the construction industry of the Russian Federation, according to the department, 4.7 thousand citizens of Uzbekistan entered. According to the association NOSTROY, the pilot project was “an effective solution to the shortage of personnel in the construction industry in the short term”, and the return to the previous procedure for regulating the entry of foreign labor “corresponds to the realities of today.” At the same time, as Kommersant was told in NOSTROY, now the construction sector needs 188 thousand workers of various specialties. The head of the project financing commission of the Public Council under the Ministry of Construction, Rifat Garipov, believes that the proposal to suspend the project is “the result of a situation where labor resources are not satisfied with the working conditions and pay at construction sites, and employers are not satisfied with the quality of work.” Now, according to him, the industry is increasingly in demand for specialists with a certain level of education who can work with complex equipment and electronics. “Among the citizens of Uzbekistan, there are enough qualified specialists, but they also receive high salaries in their homeland, and it is mainly the so-called unskilled workers who go to Russia,” the expert says.

It should be noted that earlier the head of the agency for external labor migration of Uzbekistan, Bahrom Abduvaliev, said that with the removal of anti-COVID restrictions at the borders, many migrants began to go to work on their own. “The suspension of the pilot project is unlikely to have an impact on reducing the recruitment of citizens of Uzbekistan in the Russian construction industry,” a representative of this agency told RIA Novosti on Tuesday. In total, as of December 2022, there were about 1.5 million Uzbeks in the Russian Federation. The general statistics of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia confirms that now there is no significant decrease in the influx of labor personnel from visa-free countries. In 2022, the migration services issued almost 2 million patents to migrants. For comparison, in 2019 this figure was 1.7 million.

The Ministry of Construction reports that now work will continue not on point projects, but on a comprehensive solution to the issue of optimizing the attraction of foreign labor. In particular, we can talk about the reform of migration legislation – the government submitted a corresponding bill to the State Duma at the end of November (for more details, see Kommersant of November 28, 2022). So far, according to a Kommersant source in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, work on the document has been suspended indefinitely. “The obstacles are both technical difficulties, such as, for example, the lack of chips needed to issue new migration cards, and ideological differences between the parties to the discussion of bills,” he notes.

Evgenia Kryuchkova, Anastasia Manuylova