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Russia – Labour migrants required by law to learn Russian

22 April 2014

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed amendments to the Law ‘On the legal status of foreign citizens in the Russian Federation’, requiring that from 1 January 2015, all migrants who want to live and work in the territory of Russia will be required to prove knowledge of Russian, Russian history, and the basics of Russian legislation, reports en.itar.com.

To prove their knowledge, foreigners seeking a residence and work permit in Russia will be required to submit either a certificate demonstrating that they have passed corresponding Russian language exams in their home country or a document proving they received education in the former Soviet Union before 1 September 1991. Exception will be made only for highly qualified specialists.

Poor command of the Russian language among the migrants who come to Russia to work, mainly from Central Asian countries, has been a hot-topic for several years. The generation of labour migrants from the former Soviet bloc who were educated during the Soviet era and can speak Russian well, is dwindling and is being replaced by the generation of migrants who have little practical grasp of the language.

According to the Russian Centre of Migration Studies, over the past five years the share of those who do not know Russian has increased six fold. Only half of the labour migrants are capable of filling official documents in Russian and up to a fifth do not know Russian at all.

An explanatory note to the bill stated: “The presence in the society of a considerable number of foreigners who have no chance of fully adapting to the cultural and social conditions of the host country creates a potential threat to interethnic accord.”

Migrants will be taught Russian both in their homeland and in Russia. Centres of professional training for foreign workers who plan to move to Russia will be created abroad within the framework of the state programme “Promotion of Employment.” NGOs in different regions of Russia have already been engaged in such training of migrants for several years.

Not everyone is in support of the new ‘language law’.

The President of the Federation of Migrants of Russia, an immigrant from Bangladesh, Madjumder Muhammad Amin, believes that: “The new law will not work, but will become another corruption trap. It will be easier to buy a certificate on passing the Russian test rather than to learn the ‘great and powerful language’ even at the basic level.”

He explained that he adverts on the sale of the certificates have already appeared on the internet.

Director of the Moscow-based human rights centre SOVA, Aleksander Verkhovsky also noted “the high corruption risk” of the Russian language exam.

Tatyana Illarionova, Professor of the state and municipal management department of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, added: “The language exam is an instrument of regulating the migrant flow. The fact of the adoption of such a law in itself is good, in my view, but I [don’t] have 100% confidence that it will work in practice.”