Labor markets and migration

Following the USSR’s dissolution, the EAEU states moved to a labor market model. Most faced massive unemployment and the reversal of centuries-old migration narratives. The permanent, primarily politically motivated, return migration of ethnic Russians of the 1990s was replaced soon by the massive, mostly temporary, labor migration to Russia of the post-Soviet states’ nationals. Labor migrants comprise today 7% of the RF’s economically active population. Russia also increasingly faced competition for labor migrants from Kazakhstan and, to a lesser degree, Belarus. The RF migration situation was marked by the emergence of elite emigration flow, primarily to Europe and North America. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have impacted those narratives, slowing down migration to Russia and leading to the intensification of elite and some other types of emigration (youth, male) as well as the formation of principally new ones (to a number of post-Soviet states and Global South countries).