Russia plans to fingerprint, photograph and license migrant workers in a bid to shrink the “shadow economy” and boost tax revenue, the government’s official Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper said. The new rules will apply to about 1.2 million of the estimated 3 million foreigners who work as nannies, builders, drivers, cooks and other jobs classified as “temporary” by the Federal Migration Service, the newspaper said today. Such workers will have to buy licenses good for between one and three months, while so-called highly skilled workers, mainly those who earn more than 2 million rubles ($64,000) a year, will be excluded from the new requirements. President Dmitry Medvedev is seeking to turn Russia into a “white-collar” country, Vladislav Surkov, Kremlin first deputy chief of staff, said in March. One million skilled-job vacancies went unfilled in Russia last year because of a lack of qualified workers, the World Bank said in a report in March. At the same time, because of a shrinking labor force, Russia will need 12 million immigrant workers within 20 years, the bank said. While cracking down on foreign laborers, Russia plans to make life easier for workers who are better educated and skilled to help lure investment from abroad. The government wants to react quickly to “painful points” flagged by investors, Deputy Economy Minister Stanislav Voskresensky told reporters in Moscow on May 7. One way to do that is to relax visa requirements for “highly skilled” workers, Voskresensky said.
The Business Week
