Why the US doesn't need Russian newcomers?
Shereshevskiy's think piece

ANALYTICS  24 January 2023 - 15:17

The Atlantic Council, a forum of intellectuals and politicians associated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, presented a report on February 21, 2019, that explored the characteristics of new waves of the Russian emigration. According to the report, between 1.6 and 2 million people have left Russia since the early noughties, of whom 45 per cent have a bachelor's degree and 37 per cent have a master's or doctoral degree. In the last year, another million or so have joined them.

I recently read an interesting text by a scientist who left Russia and wished to remain anonymous. He met with American diplomats and was surprised that they showed little interest in the new wave of Russian emigrants. This scholar himself (he, by the way, has been well-settled abroad for a long time) believes that this is a manifestation of the aversion of politicians towards migrants. Politicians in the West are tied to electoral cycles, and voters are not too keen, or not willing, to see "outsiders" in their homes. To add to this, western communities apply all political rows and well-known developments to the entire Russian population. And finally, the politicians of the US Democratic Party, as they have made it clear to him, are not against the masses of colored people (that's not my definition) - uneducated migrants, but are not too interested in the arrival of white, tidy, and well-educated migrants.

What can be said about that? Western politicians, of course, have a dependence on electoral cycles. And the above assessment is probably true to some extent. But it should not be exaggerated. The West is hardly a system of popular government ("democracy"), at least in the sense once given to the word. For four years, voters have no control over their elected officials, there is no direct power of general meetings, and no right to recall deputies at any time (or it does not work in practice due to atomisation and social class stratification of local voters), but there is a cultural hegemony of ruling elites achieved through the education system and media. For these reasons, and also because the real political weight is in big money and big power/administrative resources, real Western democracy is a dictatorship of big companies and bourgeois official apparatuses and their lobbyists, allied to each other, whose totality is the state.

Why am I writing about this? In my opinion, the author, by virtue of his liberal democratic views, exaggerates the importance of electoral cycles in political decision-making. And in any case, the interests of the aforementioned apparatuses and companies play a huge role in decision-making, not electoral considerations.

Why, then, is the US not yet ready to accept large numbers of migrants from Russia, despite the high qualifications of the latter (according to the well-known sociologist Natalia Zubarevich, Russia has already been abandoned by 10% of IT professionals in the latest wave of migration)?

Modern global capitalism has created enormous flows of displaced labour, including skilled labour, and trained the appropriate workforce. Iran had a few tens to a few hundred thousand students under the Shah, and now Iran has 6 million students and many of them want to work in America. University education in Türkiye is developing at such a pace that some of my interlocutors from CIS countries were shocked to see it (as well as the international composition of the student body) and concluded that the Turkish government is training managerial, scientific, and technical personnel for the entire Turkic-speaking world and that it is quite capable of achieving this. Israel continually supplies Silicon Valley and various US corporations with IT and other professionals. It is scary to think how many Indian and Chinese programmers, chemists, and biologists there are in the world. Moreover, their numbers are steadily increasing. In other words, there are plenty of Iranian mathematicians, Indian IT specialists, Polish engineers, and Israeli biochemists who want to work for Western companies.

This is not to say that the US does not need Russian IT specialists and engineers, but neither, in my view, should we overestimate their importance. Although the author is probably right that the US needs them because there is always a high demand for such specialists, he is probably right that the US underestimates their potential. But this need is partly outweighed by the factors above.

As for the poor uneducated migrants from Latin America, and the Democrats' willingness to accept them in the US, they are not only a super-cheap labour force but also the future electorate of the Democratic Party, as Republicans identify more with whites. The Republicans themselves have a line on anti-migrant sentiment and therefore cannot support any migrants, including whites (I strongly dislike the division of people into races as a basis for policy).

The countries of the former Soviet Union, on the other hand, have the most to gain from migrants. There is no such strong influx of skilled labour as in the US with its salaries. At the same time, businesses set up by Russian IT people or trading companies can have a big impact on regional economies, on Georgia and Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan, contributing to their rapid growth.

Caliber.Az