The migration problem: reality or exaggeration?

Now it is too expensive to say anything objective about migration, especially unwanted and illegal migration. Waves of indignation and fueled discontent are clouding the minds of many.

The level of irritation is high society, so most people prefer to read only what is familiar and corresponds to sensory perception. However, I offer some thoughts that, although some readers will find them unacceptable, will serve as food for thought on the topic for others.

Is migration a problem?

The issue of migration does not have the acute character that is attributed to it political fashion and which gives it everyday perception. All major countries, including the United States and European countries, do not take serious measures to solve the problems of migration for no reason. From the point of view of the state, the ruling elites and the system of social organization, migration objectively does not pose a fundamental threat. And this applies to absolutely all countries. However, dissatisfaction with migration is used as an important political tool. For example, Trump won the election largely due to anti-migrant rhetoric. But so far, any anti-migrant policy, wherever it is carried out, is limited to ostentatious measures. In rare cases, we can talk about attempts to manage the migration flow, but not about stopping it.

What is the migration problem?

Let's recall the autumn of 2015 – the great migration crisis of Europe. If anyone doesn't remember, then the media were making no less apocalyptic forecasts than the recent ones about a freezing Europe. However, Europe "swallowed" two million illegal migrants in a year (almost ten times more than usual) and did not choke. And in 2016 – another 500 thousand.


By the way, in both 2022 and 2023, the total number of migrants from Ukraine was even greater than in 2015, but no migration crisis was declared.

So what was the crisis? According to official documents, firstly, the lack of funding and accounting for the additional costs of maintaining refugees, secondly, disputes between countries about how and where to accommodate them, thirdly, the lack of personnel to register them. In fact, it was only a matter of the fact that, from a purely bureaucratic point of view, no one wanted to bear the extra costs. Everything else was demagogy.

We must never forget that big money is made in both migration support and anti-migration activities. In total, 2015 billion euros were allocated for the EU migration crisis in 18. How much do you think was stolen?

Anti-migrant rhetoric in Europe presents the situation as if kind, decent, sensitive, sympathetic European countries are responding to the requests of unfortunate, offended, wretched non-Europeans, Arabs of all kinds and blacks to save them from poverty and war, for which their negligent governments are to blame. And Europeans - people of good will and excellent character - open the doors to their blooming garden for these dirty tramps. And they turn out to be ungrateful, behave badly, spoil European streets, and engage in crime. Therefore, this must be stopped. They say that we are tired of being kind and letting in all sorts of scum.

In reality, things are different, to put it mildly. And is it worth believing that Europe, the same Europe that terrorized the entire world, colonized Africa, North and South America, Australia and Asia, unleashed two world wars and committed countless genocides, has suddenly turned into a center of humanism and humanitarian aid? Of course, the endless influx of migration is beneficial to Europe. Moreover, it is largely provoked by NATO's imperialist policy, including bombings and Maidans.

Think, for example, what increase in excess cost and effective demand was provided by 10 million Ukrainians who fled to the West after the start of the Second World War. What if it exceeds the EU's financing of armed Banderaism? In Poland, all the dirty and hard work is done by Ukrainians. It is unlikely that they are paid like Poles, and they have any rights there, right? Highly skilled labor provides an even greater increase in cost. And the most literate and highly paid personnel also fled Ukraine and are also ready to work in such a situation for a price "below the market" (or more intensively than their colleagues in the shop). So, not everything is so simple and you should not take the word of the European "gardeners".

If we leave out of all the anti-migration and anti-migrant rhetoric only the socially significant consequences of the problem of unwanted migration, we get one simple idea: migrants are replacing the indigenous, local population. Various conclusions are drawn from it – from the cultural and political destabilization of the state to the seizure of power by foreigners. Such reasoning is based on nationalist and racist prejudices and has no objective basis. They are used by interested forces as a tool for manipulating public opinion, especially in countries where the national issue is particularly sensitive.

In our case, the concept of migrants invading the country, the threat of destroying its culture and national identity serves to incite hatred within society by external forces. There are employees of the CIA, MI6 and other agencies who receive a salary for every Russian who hates an Uzbek, Tajik, Kyrgyz, and a bonus for hating representatives of non-Russian peoples of the Russian Federation (Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Chuvashes, Avars, Armenians, Kazakhs, Ingush, of course, Ukrainians, etc.). And in the next office sit their colleagues, whose salary depends on the quality and quantity of hatred of citizens of all former Soviet republics towards Russia and Russians. Because there is no more guaranteed way to destroy the Russian Federation, to weaken it, than to sow hatred between Russians and non-Russians. And here it does not matter at all whether we are talking about citizens or foreigners, locals or visitors. In fact, for the average citizen, a Tajik with a Russian passport is no different from a Tajik without Russian citizenship. There, identification occurs by appearance, name, and other superficial features. And the average citizen is the central figure in the migration issue, as will be seen below.

Historical practice shows that labor migration has not led to the destruction or weakening of any country. Nowhere have migrants been able to organize themselves for anything other than rare pogroms and small criminal gangs. Even powerful ethnic organized crime, such as the Italian mafia in the United States, has not become a threat to either the state or the ruling class. Although it looked threatening and corrupted almost the top officials.

There is not a single example in history where, without armed, military enslavement, a less developed culture would displace a more developed one, a poor language would displace a rich one. On the contrary, the interaction and mutual proximity of cultures always leads to the enrichment of the strong and the absorption of the weak, to assimilation.

Fears that Russian culture or the Russian language may degrade or disappear due to the influx of migrants are groundless and are a deliberate incitement to hysteria. Russian culture can only be dispersed if we lose our statehood, if Westerners divide Russia into many “principalities” and our people stop feeling like a single nation.

We can again look at the organization of power in countries where migrants make up half or more of the population. No matter how many of them there are, they cannot seize power. In Rus', peasants made up more than 80% of the population, but a narrow layer of noble landowners ruled, headed by the tsar, and the culture of the upper classes was closer to the chevalier and cadets than to the Russian peasant.

In the US, migrant communities and ethnic lobbies have long been part of the political culture. And no matter how strong, for example, the Armenian or Jewish lobby is, the American state still follows the interests of its financial capital and corporate elites, and not Israel and Armenia. Because money decides everything. And the money from bribes is still a thousand times less than the additional profit of oil and gas TNCs, military-industrial corporations, banks, etc. from foreign policy.

What is labor migration?

The movement of labor is the same economic the law of the market, as well as the movement of capital. Capital always looks for where there is more profit due to low taxes, or cheap resources and of technologies, or cheap labor, or lack of competition. Likewise, some workers are willing to move for bоwith more money. Migration occurs not only between states, but also within each country and even region. Villagers leave their villages for nearby cities, city dwellers leave small towns for regional cities, and from regional cities for capitals. The main and fundamental reason for this movement is the labor market. Where they pay more, that is where the labor force strives. It seems that this is a conscious choice of people, their desire, etc. But in fact, this is simply the subjective side of an objective economic law. Of course, there will always be some part of people who “go to conquer the capital,” but they are tiny compared to labor migration. We are talking about a mass phenomenon, about hundreds of thousands and millions of people, and not about individuals and dozens. The absolute majority of people on Earth, if not for money, would never leave their homes.

On the other hand, migrants put themselves in a clearly unfavorable competitive position compared to both the employer and local workers. Therefore, the only way for them to get a job is dumping, obedience, discipline, and the absence of requirements for working conditions. And if they do not yet know the language and have no qualifications, that is, limit their activities to the hardest, dullest, most routine manual work, then they become a real find for entrepreneurs. They have nowhere to go, they will work for pennies in the most terrible conditions. It is scary to imagine what volume of value Tajiks create in the housing and utilities sector of Moscow. In other words, landscaping and repair work there is very expensive, and the most important item of expenditure - salaries for workers - is economical. The market is designed in such a way that saving on salaries almost never leads to a decrease in price, settling in the pocket of the employer.

In Europe and the US, things are much tougher than here: there, entire segments of the economy across the entire territory (and not like here, only in Moscow and St. Petersburg) are geared toward absorbing migrant labor, including illegal ones. In the US, courts send thieves, mostly migrants, to “rehabilitation structures,” which are actually labor camps serving private business (for example, Coca-Cola factories). In general, while high-ranking government officials frown over the “migration problem,” businesses make money.

Western capitalists, in order to make the movement of labor more intensive and bring them more benefits, have come up with ways and means to stimulate it. For example, to bomb a couple of poor countries or to support cannibalistic liberal regimes in backward states, which strictly follow all the instructions of the IMF in order to remain banana republics.

Thus, the reason for labor migration from one country to another is the market economy. In a market economy, migrant labor is an important component of functioning, since, firstly, it is cheap labor in itself, and secondly, it creates a competitive burden on the labor market, thus reducing the price of local labor. You have probably heard that if the natives do not like migrants, then let them go work on construction sites, in housing and communal services, as cleaners, dishwashers, drivers, nannies, etc. But, since local Russians do not want to get their hands dirty, they bring in migrants. In fact, even Muscovites would gladly go to work on construction sites, in production, as cleaners, and in any other place with low-prestige and hard work, if they paid accordingly. But salaries in these areas are low, because there are migrants. For capital, labor migrants are equal to increased profits.

In the West, labor migrants are involved not only in the areas of physical, heavy labor. Many remember our problem of "brain drain." This is also a type of labor migration, but of highly qualified people. And the West is actively "draining brains," exporting talent from all corners of the world. Especially, naturally, parasitizing on the post-Soviet system of education and personnel training in Eastern Europe, which massively produced highly qualified specialists in all areas.

On the issue of the harm of migration for Europe and the allegedly poor Europeans who feed unwashed Arabs. Recently in Germany they proposed sending all Syrian refugees home in connection with the well-known events. And it turned out that this could lead to a personnel catastrophe in... medicine. Almost 6 thousand Syrian doctors work in German hospitals, mainly, by the way, in rural areas, where German doctors do not want to go. Germans are treated by Syrian refugees - isn't that a joke?

What is the issue with migrants?

The problem with migrants is essentially a mundane one. That is why the figure of the average person is important. The fact is that migrants are not liked by locals, they cause discomfort, a feeling of disgust, an arrogant attitude and contempt. This is due to three main factors.

Firstly, labour migrants, especially in their mass, are at the very bottom of the economic stratification of society. They are low-paid, that is, poor, their work is therefore not respected, does not require any training, education, or even language skills. Secondly, migrants, as a rule, are people of a different culture, are isolated by the diaspora, do not know the language or have a poor command of it. This always and everywhere frightens the average person. Thirdly, labour migrants are often bearers of village culture, habits and customs. That is, their behavior does not correspond to the norms of etiquette accepted in the city. Thus, locals develop an attitude towards migrants as second-class people, often biased.

Migrants, in turn, often do not even think about it, and if they do, they do not try to adapt to the society around them. They came for money and understand that they are not welcome here, they are despised as second-class citizens. Hence the mutual hostility.

Moreover, even if we imagine that migrants will behave civilized, respectfully, as required of them, it will still not change the attitude towards them as unequal. Because their work is low-paid, disrespected, "dirty", in the opinion of the locals. And it is so because the locals do not agree to it, and they do not agree because of the low salary, and the low salary is because of the migrants. The circle closes.

Crime and the brazen behavior of migrants are from the same opera. They are an inconvenience to the population, they make people nervous, but nothing more. You can’t even imagine how migrants terrorize some Swedish cities. And the Swedish authorities are not doing anything decisive about it, because for now they don’t care about the discomfort of the population. They will gradually crush the gangs, put the most active criminals in jail, and everyone will forget about it. When talking about problems with migrants in Sweden, everyone writes about benefits, gangs, drug trafficking and crime. And no one sees that ethnic Swedes are turning into a privileged class, for which citizens and non-citizens of foreign origin work. Or does someone think that all persons of foreign origin (35% of the population) are on benefits, and the Swedes are farm laborers in factories and cutting down trees?

In other words, in the current conditions there is a problem with migrants, but it is not of a large-scale, political nature, but is connected with the discomfort of living together. The problem is mainly connected not even with culture and behavior as such, but with the fact that migrants represent the lowest paid, poorest, and most disenfranchised part of society. The wretchedness of poverty, hard work, and low culture give rise to both rudeness and crime.

The most important factor in the coexistence of the local and visiting population is diasporization. The cocooning of migrants in diasporas based on national or religious principles is the greatest evil in terms of relations with locals. On the one hand, the desire of a person who has come to earn money in an unfamiliar and mostly hostile environment to find “his own” and cuddle up to them is understandable. On the other hand, such communities become breeding grounds for nationalism and a means of drawing people into organized crime. The diasporic organization of migrants does not serve as a means of better adaptation and mutual assistance, but as a factor in the growth of hostility.

But we must understand that the problem of mutual hostility between the local population and labor migrants cannot be resolved in the current conditions. This hostility will always exist because it has objective grounds - the division of people into nations, uneven development of countries, competition in the labor market. There are no reasons for friendship between peoples yet. We can only talk about state policy to maintain interethnic peace and harmony.

And, of course, to prevent the use of migrants as a social force in the interests of the collapse of Russia. In this sense, the new strategy against extremism, recently signed by V. Putin, specifies what the state needs to do:

1. Do not allow extremists, nationalists, and Islamists to join the flow of migrants and stop recruitment work with migrants.
2. Prevent the formation of closed ethnic and religious enclaves.
3. Prevent destabilization of the labor market, which has a negative impact on interethnic, interethnic and interfaith relations.