Kremlin wants to bring Russians living abroad back to Russia
The Russian government has approved a plan for the voluntary resettlement of “compatriots living abroad”.
By 2030, it is planned to bring back to Russia at least 500 thousand citizens, according to the resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers on amendments to the state program "Ensuring public order and combating crime".
Resettlement, according to the document, should be organized "by providing emigrants with state guarantees from the federal budget."
Temporary visiting groups of the Foreign Ministry and the Internal Ministry will be engaged in bringing emigrants back to their homeland. They will personally travel abroad and convince compatriots to move back to the Russian Federation. The government approved this procedure in January last year, the Parliamentary Gazette reports.
The duties of these visiting groups will include informing Russian emigrants about the Russian State Program to Assist the Voluntary Resettlement of Compatriots Living Abroad to Russia.
According to the World Bank statistics for 2017, 10.6 million citizens of the Russian Federation left the country to work abroad. Russia firmly holds the leadership in number of emigrants among the 24 countries that the World Bank refers to as the "Europe and Central Asia" region.
This constitutes 7.4% loss of the Russian population. If pensioners (35 million people) are excluded from the calculations, the country lost 9.7% of its labor force.