Stricter Employment for Immigrants in Russia

There are now new employment regulations in Russia that have been set up to combat the flow of illegal immigrants. These regulations include a foreign labor quota. This quota limits the number of foreign employees for each company. The process is very difficult to get through. First of all, to even get a quota for the number of foreign employees a company can have, they must first prove that the jobs cannot be filled by Russian citizens. Then the company has to apply for a permit to hire said employee and order them a personal work permit. An immigrant can no longer apply for the permit themselves. They must ask the company to do it for them. To attain a work permit, the potential employee must provide documentation of their education and qualifications for the job they are applying for, and if the documents of proof of education are from a foreign institute, they must be legalized and translated into Russian. But there are exceptions being made for certain countries and workers who are specialists in their field of labor. Citizens of the Kazakhstan no longer require permits to work in Russia. And foreigners who have the proper work experience and meet the qualifications for the “specialist” labor category are awarded permits and multiple work visas that last up to three years. Another major change to the structure of the foreign labor force is that the number of days an immigrant has to find another job if they lose the one they have before being deported. The new number is 15. They must have a new labor contract filled with another company within 15 days of their last employment before they are deported.

This situation, while understandable in its attempts to lower the number of illegal immigrants in Russia, is causing much concern for the legal immigrants. For them, their lives are now all the more difficult. It raises the question of whether these new regulations help more than hurt. The same can be said for The US. The stricter we are in keeping illegal immigrants out and unemployed, the harder it is for those who are here legally.

http://rbth.ru/articles/2012/02/10/dealing_with_the_migration_bureaucracy_14340.html