This is a horse I’ve pretty much beaten to death, but still worth pointing out – not many Russians want to leave Russia. And not many Russians ever wanted to leave Russia.
Results of the latest Levada polls:
Incidentally, when I was in Saint-Petersburg, the hotel receptionist said that if anything, there has been a substantial increase in repatriates like myself.
Another account to that effect.
I am not going to claim that there is some great repatriation trend, because I am not a dishonest Western hack who constructs a “sixth wave of emigration” meme on the basis of purely anecdotal evidence.
Still, it’s something to think about it.
Incidentally, according to the OECD’s latest PPP benchmarks (2014), actual Russian household consumption is comparable to the rest of East-Central Europe and the Baltics, and is at 50%+ of the German/French/UK level and 42% of the US one.
The OECD countries & partners, with Russia in red.
Russia has also continued gaining relative to the US through to 2014, despite the Great Recession. It must have fallen somewhat during the 2014-2016 recession and devaluation, but only modestly, since Russia produces most of its own consumer goods.
Rule of thumb for Russia: While wages might be 4x lower than in the developed Western countries, prices are likewise 2x lower, so the differential in living standards is far more modest.
So, no particular reason for Russians to want to leave, considering the administrative barriers they face as a non-Schengen European country.
I suppose that if Russia had freedom of movement with the EU (like Poland, Romania), or was truly destitute (like Ukraine, Moldova), then there would surely be more emigration.
But this is not the case. And, hypocritical though it might be on some level, that’s probably for the best. Russia has already lost enough of its cognitive elites during the 1910s-1930s and the 1990s.
There seems to have been an increase in people considering emigration in about 2010…why?
Would be interesting to compare this with data for western Europe, my impression is there’s a lot of talk about emigrating among those who get how dreadful the future is going to be if current trends continue.
Somewhat surprising that there was not much interest shown during the 1990s times of turmoil. Was that due to lack of resources to pay for a move, administrative difficulties in exit or perhaps fewer recipient countries?
This is just a guess, but it’s probably related to the 2008-2009 financial crisis, which hit Russia very hard. Oil prices still hadn’t recovered at that point. And Russians hadn’t realized yet that it was bad pretty much everywhere.
Russians are non Muslim whites so they have nowhere to go.
Would the Russian public be open to inviting in 10s of million of racist Westerners to speed up economic development and further weaken the West?
emigrate to where? White people have nowhere to go except for maybe Latin America.
I have to disagree. Losing circus-freaks of the so-called “cognitive elites” is always beneficial, for any society.
I’ve been living as an ex-pat in Moscow for the last ten months. It’s not bad–if I were a younger man, I’d consider staying. (I’m not eligible for Russian national health care and the language is difficult to learn in one’s seventh decade). The only Russian person I know expressing a desire to emigrate finds Moscow’s climate depressing. It does rain a lot more than I thought it would!
Funnily, but hysterical EU-US Russophobia helps Russia to save human resource
Even after all the horrors they have suffered, both external and internal, they still love their country. And money isn’t everything, except for a certain percentage of any population.
Until about 4 years ago, we were loving them too, what with the supermodels and sports stars and ‘crazy lovable Russian’ videos and productive investment, now largely abandoned or destroyed. The fact that Google streetview was allowed to operate in the country (check out the countries that don’t allow it) shows that the West was welcome, that there was no paranoia, and that cultural and economic exchange was encouraged and hoped for, and reveals the great historical tragedy of the engineering of a hate campaign against a nation, its leader, and its people, that has no basis in logic, fact, or reason other than the creation of an ‘enemy’, the classic expression of foreign policy or perhaps an extension of domestic policy when the policies and practices of your own country/countries are bankrupt and the peasants must be distracted from the onerous cost of military adventurism by easy-chair warriors.
Unlike you, greaseball, who can always emigrate to the Jewish paradise of Israel. Why haven’t you ?
Agree 100%. Russia did really well, all thing considered, without those “elites”. In fact, more immigration of those “elites” to somewhere other than Russia is highly desirable.
Because it’s a shit hole
I want to know how much race plays a factor in these decisions ? Does the average Russian on the street know about how rapidly non white places like USA, London, France, Australia, etc, are becoming ? If they do know, does this play a factor in not wanting to go there, or do they not care.
Russia is a country at war with women and trying to become Saudi Arabia. Its against everything progress should be with inclusive human rights and open borders.
Nice trolling attempt, but “open borders” is too much of a right wing cliche at this point.
I suggest replacing it with something more anodyne like “freedom of movement” or “open to the world” to make it more convincing.
Anatoly:
Perhaps changing to “freedom of subversion” or “open to invite/invade the world”.
Look how people easily confuse cognitive elite with socio economic elite. The same people??
If the answer is yes so.. Houston we have a problem with higher IQ people without wisdom in the power.
More Americans think Putin is great than think he is a beast or a doofus. I have more respect for Putin than any Western leader right now. And my daughters think he is a stud.
Hm. As I said previusly the average/median per hour rate ratio betwen Russia and the USA is 1 to 5. One might imagine to get a parity the prices in the USA must be 5 times higher, while in fact they vary considerably, depending on the particluar good. However, my impression Americans got more goods for their buck. And your arithmetic just confirms that: if the wages are “4x lower”, but goods just “2x lower”, that means Russians can buy as twice as less goods. So the differential is hardly “modest”.
Must be the former. The 1990s were the best time for Russians to emigrate to the West for the Western migration rules and laws were quite relaxed. Much has changed by the 2010s though. Today it is quite difficult. This is why the whole idea that the West must “close its open borders” seems for me absolutely ridiculous. The right in the West simply have no idea that their migration laws have been becoming stricter for the past 20-30 years, not laxer as they falsely tend to think.
You have lost nothing.
For me rainy weather is not that bad. What is truly hard are Russian winters that in fact last for 7 months a year even in Central Russia.
As for the current rainy weather I must say this years is quite anomalous.
Consider this:
http://www.radixjournal.com/blog/census-europeans-europe
Russia is less white even than such “diversity paradises” like Benelux and Scandinavia. And Russia has really open and uncontrolled borders with Muslim Asia, very relaxed migration laws, and very corrupt migration police (e.g. Central Asians need no visas for 90 days, which practically means “everybody, welcome”).
Since when is losing high iq STEM specialists desirable? There’s no need to conflate self appointed robber barons with the legions of mathematicians and physicists that jumped ship in the 90s.
No, that is simply false. Yes it has gotten harder for whites to immigrate to the West but countries like Germany and Italy have literal open borders for non whites. The US before Trump essentially has had an open southern border for the last 15 years and Obama had begun importing increasingly large numbers of Islamic refugees.
No, it is not true. The law is for everybody, white and non-whites alike, and Russia is not particularly discriminated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_the_Schengen_Area#Visa_exemptions
How the regime where Afghanis, Iraqis, Iranians, or Pakistanis need the visa even to transit the EU means “open borders” is out of any logic and understanding. If anything the EU is quite open and relaxed exactly towards white countries plus a few rich Asian countries.
Bullshit. Try moving sneaking to the US and your Russian self will be deported so fast your head will spin. However, if you are non white and sneak into the US you will not be deported unless you commit a crime. Maybe this is one of those things you have to live in the US to know, but everybody in America knows that this is true.
And it is waaaaaayyyyy harder for whites to legally immigrate to American then for non whites. We even passed a law in the 60’s explicitly designed to make it harder for whites and easier for non whites to move here.
You just wait until Russia becomes globo-Westernized and “affluent” in the Western manner, the way idiots like you want it to become; and the EU, U.S. and international globo-liberalist open borders brigade start filling Russia up with hordes of blacks and Middle Eastern Muslim Arabs, Pakistanis, Turks etc. all of whom are an order of magnitude worse than ex-USSR Central Asians (many of whom are harmless and, at this point in time, still just nominally Muslim for the most part and under at least some ex-USSR/Russian/Chinese socio-cultural influence), you stupid cantankerous perpetually-malcontented nihilist fool.
Where is Talha? I miss my Pakistani BFF.
The law being the same is meaningless if the enforcement is not the same. Besides that, a big part of the problem are people that come past the migration controls: nobody asks visas from the Africans that climb the fences at Ceuta and Melilla while there are next to no Russians even attempting to cross illegally.
For example, at the start of the Ukraine crisis there was a flood of asylum seekers from east Ukraine arriving to Finland through Russia and they were all almost immediately sent back to Russia on the grounds that Russia is a safe country for them. Somehow this logic was not applied to brown and black people who walked through a dozen states to apply in Finland, Scandinavia or Germany and did not got sent back to perfectly safe but poor ex-communist states, even though Schengen refugee rules stated that they should apply in the first safe country.
After Merkel’s fuckup we had thousands of brown and black people per day walk over the border from Sweden claiming to be Syrian refugees. Even if their asylum applications get rejected, they’re still never deported because their home countries won’t take them back (often they even refuse to tell which country they came from so no one knows where we’re supposed to send them) and the EU is completely toothless against Turkey and Arab states that keep pulling this trick.
Russia has turned out to be a good neighbor in this as they actually take back people and we now have an agreement that makes it easy to deport people (no thanks to the EU that tried to block direct Finnish-Russian negotiations). It is still possible to get asylum if you’re coming from Russia but since the asylum system is controlled by the lunatic left you need to be a Caucasian Muslim, a homosexual activist or something like that. Russians and Ukrainians are white people so they are never going to be considered refugees even if they arrive with bullet wounds.
Not many Russians seem to get how deeply racialized Western worldviews have become (thanks to American influence) and how everything is now done differently for white people and for brown and black people.
Those numbers of “people of european origin” in Russia actually seems roughly like the number of ethnic russians living there, that means the rest would be from the minorities living on the republics and other regions of Russia, not only some faceless non-europeans/non-(ethnic) russian migrants walking around the big cities, where it’s common anywhere in the world to see people of all ethnicities walk through them, even if you transit in some areas where you don’t actually see them that much.
Anyway, the movement of central asians is troublesome indeed, but it’s not like the government and even the population there act easily on them if they decide to stay, or even these central asians really want to stay in Russia like mexicans in the US, seen how they were faster to return to their countries once sactions hit Russia.
I suppose legal immigration is hard for Russians, but Greasy William is right, there are de facto open borders for “refugees”…existing laws simply aren’t enforced, nobody gets deported and those invaders are treated better than regular, legal migrants.
If you want to emigrate to Germany (which I wouldn’t recommend) just pretend you’re a Chechen and claim asylum 🙂
Yes, that’s completely right. In Germany last year around 25 000 fake “refugees” were deported back to their countries of origin…but 14 000 were people from the Balkans where countries are somewhat cooperative because they want to make a good impression on the EU. Only about 7000 non-Europeans were sent back. Basically if you’re Arab, Afghan/Pakistani or African you get to stay, no matter that in the vast majority of cases those people don’t have any right to asylum even under the most generous interpretation of existing laws. If you obfuscate your identity (at some point in early 2016 it was reported about 70% of new arrivals had somehow “lost” their identity papers before entering Germany) and come from a state that doesn’t cooperate in taking its citizens back, you have a very high chance of staying permanently, with the prospect of lifelong welfare payments and eventually even citizenship. And there’s no political will to change this since even mainstream “conservatives” are totally complicit in the present system and see “antiracism” as the highest virtue.
Is that you, Tiny Duck?
Capital flight? South Korea had the death penalty for that you know.
Who said anything about STEM? On the other hand, providing for comfortable retirement somewhere far away from Russia of such “Cognitive elites” as Moscow’s High School Of Economics (VShE) is highly desirable, if not crucial for national security of Russia. I also have some good points to make about STEM but it is not necessary at this time.
Mathematicians and physicists who jumped the ship in the 90s had become mathematicians and physicists back in the day when society had intensives for that sort of career.
In the new, capitalist society, mathematicians and physicists are losers who aren’t smart enough to become wheelers-dealers.
Rubbish. High talent in mathematics or physics is a near guaranteed ticket to the upper middle class or further. I studied theoretical physics and most of my friends from the university have done very well, some exceedingly well with startups, and the people who aren’t wealthy by their mid-thirties are so mostly because they chose academia.
Finance, by the way, talent scouts physicists and mathematicians in universities because it has plenty of hard mathematical work to do and many of my university mates are now living very well in London or the United States in finance jobs. Personally I think that’s soul crushing (spend your whole life making models on how to shuffle around speculative capital most efficiently?) but a capitalist economy is certainly an amazing opportunity for mathematical talent, especially physicists who get a thorough applied math education.
Of course another side of mathematics talent is that since it’s not language or culture dependent it’s very easy to brain drain from one country to another. Socialist countries can only keep the part of mathematical talent that’s satisfied with academic life, the money for applied math talent in modern capitalist economies is too good.
It’s nowhere near “amazing opportunity”. Being a hedge fund manager is an amazing opportunity. And between that and mathematician, there lays a huge spectrum of opportunities (stock brokers, banksters, corporate lawyers and managers, etc.) that the “cognitive elites” will surely turn to before they give in to being “satisfied with academic life”. Besides, Finland (you’re a Finn, right?) is nowhere near the typical capitalist country, so your personal experience is irrelevant.
“It’s nowhere near “amazing opportunity”. Being a hedge fund manager is an amazing opportunity. ”
Eh? Physicist is a particularly common background among hedge fund managers. Hedge funds have been an amazing opportunity for physicists over the past few decades. It’s not like there’s a guaranteed career track from an education in applied math to hedge fund manager but if you have no connections but you have talent, it’s a way to get your foot in the door.
You seem to have this bizarre view where filthy capitalist bosses just come out of nowhere to be the oppressive capitalist class. Sometimes the boss is the son of the previous boss, true, but more often the boss worked his way up and to do that he had to get his foot in.
Finland is indeed irrelevant for high finance. Those students of physics I knew from university who later made a lot of money in finance had to leave Finland and go to London or American cities. Finland is too small but Russia is not and Moscow is big enough to become another London or New York.
Still, in Finland physics and mathematics graduates are doing much better in income than average for university graduates but then, we do waste massive resources educating people in useless fields like gender studies that bring down the averages…
My point exactly. Banksters’ recruiters come to MIT classes before graduation and take the cream of the crop, “cognitive elites”. Who will then work hard to wreck the society. Well, the world, really. That’s the pattern.
Not going, but I must say the chance of being stopped by police and hence busted for white illegals is like 10 times less than for brown or black. And you’ve just repeated typical right-wing sensational journalism moaning. I’ve heard it hundred of times. Boring.
What law?
Well, the only thing you’re left to do is to provide some proofs, like actual statistics. Because your retelling of right-wing sensational journalism is not going work for me. And if what you’re saying is indeed true, then you’ve just confessed that your law enforcement bodies are totally corrupt and defunct. Even worse and more corrupt than Somali, Iraq or places like that where they at least have some reasons to be defunct. Your country is defunct. All Europe is defunct. Though, in fact this is most unlikely. Everything seems working as usual. Europeans seem to be simply hysterical pussies so they even cannot face like 100 refugees, this is already total disaster for them and the end of the world. Finland must be like 99% white but you’re already panicking. I used to be somewhat sympathetic to Europeans in this respect, but now I’ve simply become tired of their hysteria. Europeans are pathetic.
And well, if your country is defunct what are you going to do? There are few if any ways left. We’ve already seen, and you’ve agreed, that your immigration laws are strictest, little can be amended. You only could force your officials to work. How are your going to force your local police to catch illegals? How are you going to force your migration service to deport them? How are you going to force your border police not to let them in? This seems to be an impossible task as you said your country is defunct like Somalia hence all democratic mechanisms of controlling the government are not working. Am I right? Do you agree the EU is as defunct as Somalia? Or we have another way of looking at this: all this right-wing hysteria has little to do with the reality.