Hosting the roundtable was the State Duma, parliament's lower house.
Russia direly needs workforce immigration. Immigrants are Russia's boon. That's what the Interior Ministry and the Federal Migration Service proceed from, said Mr. Tyurkin. The Service intends shortly to establish offices in every CIS country and in several countries outside the post-Soviet area. The offices are to encourage and assist prospective voluntary immigrants.
710 immigrants from Latvia, 4,412 from Kyrgyzstan, and 9,866 from Turkmenistan obtained Russian residence permits within this year, say the latest Federal Migration Service statistics.
Mr. Tyurkin does not think contemporary developments demand a compulsory inflow of new settlers to Siberia and the Russian Far East. There are economic means to attract settlers-people will flock in once they are offered lucrative readjustment terms, he said.
There is a dark side to the matter, however-the neighbouring countries will be irritated once Russia passes the repatriation bill, warned the migration functionary.
Drafted by Andrei Savelyev and Alexander Chuyev of the Rodina (Motherland) parliamentary group, the bill entitles to repatriation and naturalisation "ethnic Russians; Ukrainian and Belarussians, who are ethnically and historically related to Russians; and persons of other ethnic entities indigenous to Russia, which have no statehood outside Russia". The bill vouches government readjustment grants to immigrants.
There are up to 25 million ethnic Russians outside Russia, and it is high time for this country to change its policies towardethnic Russians abroad, calls MP Chuyev. He deems it necessary to draft another bill, on immigrants from other countries and people from other parts of Russia to add to the scanty population of Siberia and the Russian Far East.
