The invasion of migrants has become a boon for Russia

In the recent flood of news about a migrant who wanted to take a 16-year-old girl home, other similar reports are lost. All major media outlets wrote about the Kaliningrad incident, and even regional websites picked up and republished the news – in Kuban, Transbaikalia, Magnitogorsk, and Crimea.

Only a few local websites wrote about the fact that in the same Kaliningrad two men kidnapped an 18-year-old boy, kept him in a barn, and beat him. However, news about kidnappings in the Leningrad region, Ugra, Moscow region, and Altai was also noticed only there. For the central media, such stories of “friends kidnapping their own” are not very interesting, and social networks do not pick them up. If only there were migrants again…

The story of an elderly womanizer who molested a 13-year-old girl in the Jacuzzi of a fitness club, and of a relative who seduced a 10-year-old boy, do not become sensations and are lost against the backdrop of any similar crime, but with a migrant in the leading role.

Readers want fried food, the media wants to please readers, readers, intimidated by media reports, are increasingly taking an alarming interest in migrant crimes – the circle is closed. And the average Russian, who has encountered migrants many times in his life and received a good impression from interacting with them, already also believes that newcomers are the original evil.

Meanwhile, migrants are like fairies who appear at night, do good deeds and disappear with the first rays of the sun. And in Moscow, where migrants are more visible, most of them remain hidden from view, and Muscovites do not even question who provides their comfort.

In smaller cities, migrants are not visible at all, and the townspeople do not even think about who repairs and sweeps the roads, sorts the garbage, builds and decorates houses. Animation of the inanimate is in use: “blocks are being built,” “squares are appearing.” Sometimes provincial officials casually take credit for solving communal problems, and neither they nor the city residents even remember that most of the “dirty work” was done by people – with pens, pens. And these people are, for the most part, labor migrants.

A Russian who orders a product online is unlikely to wonder how many migrant workers are working to ensure that the package reaches the delivery point. He doesn’t see countless loaders, sorters, packers, storekeepers, and loading equipment drivers, and therefore he quite sincerely believes that the Internet has done everything.

If all the migrants leave Russia overnight, it will turn out that it will be impossible to live in cities—the usual benefits will become unavailable. The Russians themselves, even understanding the depth of the problem, will not rush to take the vacated places – the work that visitors undertake is too uncomfortable and unprofitable.

So, migrant labor is invisible, but crimes are visible. And it is precisely this contradiction that from time to time causes a seething of emotions, resulting in rather harsh statements by individual politicians.

But is it really impossible to do without migrant workers in a country with almost 150 million people? They managed somehow after the Great Patriotic War, they raised the country from the ruins with their own hands. And everything worked out. Why can’t it now?

It’s impossible because capitalism is structured differently. Under socialism, people built in order to build. Now open the Charter of any enterprise and make sure that it was created to make a profit. Business needs profit, which means it needs cheap labor. We need people who work hard and consume little.

It is Russian business that is interested in workers who will live not in comfortable apartments, but in basements, sheds, booths, containers, or huddle ten people in rooms filled with three-story bunks. The employer saves on employees, the employees save on the comfort of their lives. Moreover, this saving drives them into conditions that Russians will no longer agree to.

But it is still possible to reduce the number of migrants. True, this will require counter-instinctive actions. It seems that everything is obvious – the stronger the bans and restrictions, the fewer migrants will come. But this is not how market economics works.

Restrictions lead to greater lack of rights for migrants and thereby reduce the cost of labor even more; the employer receives additional profits due to this. Firstly, this affects the entire labor market – competition with newcomers increases the production rate for locals as well. Secondly, illegal immigrants without rights turn out to be so “cheap” that it is more profitable for an entrepreneur to pay a bribe to representatives of regulatory authorities.

As a result, we get an increase in corruption, a deterioration in the situation of Russian employees and an increase in migration all rolled into one.

But if you go in the diametrically opposite direction, then the result will be different. Suppose the state begins to demand that businesses provide all workers – both citizens and migrants – with equal conditions: an eight-hour working day, a decent salary, a social package that includes full medical insurance and contributions to the social fund, then migrants will not be needed. Why invite a foreigner when it’s easier to hire a Russian? The expenses are the same. Corruption schemes for “legalizing illegal immigrants” will also die out – these will be excess losses.

This diagram makes it clear that migrants are not a natural disaster or a problem external to us. Migrants are drawn to Russia by domestic business with the assistance of domestic (and sometimes corrupt) officials. Of course, this problem will not be resolved quickly; it will take time to restructure the labor market and get the business “accustomed” to operating without excess profits. However, the likelihood that Russian officials will take this constructive path is close to zero.

And, of course, when studying the problems of migration, it would be nice to look back at our traditions. And the history of migrants in Russia is long and multifaceted. Among the visitors are the Dane Vitus Jonassen Bering, the Scotsman Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly, the Swiss Franz Lefort, the German Sophia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst, better known as Catherine II. And Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, let me remind you, was the grandson of an unfortunate African migrant.

In the rest of the world, migrants don’t just wave brooms, either. In 1968, Farouk Al-Qasim, fresh from Iraq in Norway, was wandering through the bureaucracy of Oslo, trying to find out how to get documents to work as a taxi driver. In one of the corridors he stopped a Norwegian and asked where he should go, where to start. The Norwegian suggested and then asked who the migrant worked in his homeland. And when he found out that Faruk was a geologist and oil worker, he called him into his office. Within a couple of days, Al-Qasim was working as a consultant to the Ministry of Industry. His responsibilities included analyzing the results of exploration in the North Sea.

A little later, the Americans received a license to drill a series of exploration wells. The first wells made it clear that there is no oil and cannot be. The oil workers wanted not to continue, but the corrosive migrant insisted that the work be completed. And the latest drilling has discovered one of the largest oil fields in the world.

The sudden wealth that fell on Norway could have become an “oil curse,” turning the country into another “gas station,” but Al-Qasim, who had already acquired a certain authority, intervened in the development of events. It was he who insisted that the national wealth of the new homeland should not go into private hands, ensuring the prosperity of the country and citizens for many decades.

Among the three founders of the most popular Internet channel YouTube, only one is American. Steve Chen was born in Taiwan, and Javed Karim is a “hereditary migrant”, he was born in the GDR in the family of a German woman and a Bangladeshi immigrant, and the family left Germany for the USA.

Elon Musk is also not a first-generation migrant. On his maternal side, his ancestors are Swiss Germans who left for the USA, then to Canada and then to South Africa. On the paternal side, all are also migrants, their path is Holland, Britain, South Africa. And Elon, who was already born in Pretoria, moved to the USA.

When you look arrogantly at a migrant who sweeps the streets, prepares your order in fast food or takes you in a taxi, think about the fact that he or his child can become incredibly useful for all of Russia.