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Tajikistan to Ask Putin for Amnesty
Makhmadsaid Ubaidulloev, speaker of the upper house of the Tajik parliament has announced that Tajikistan will officially propose this autumn that Russia grant a immigration amnesty to Tajik citizens working illegally in Russia. Since 2002, 50,000 Tajik illegal immigrants have been deported from Russia, which represents 10 percent of the total Tajik workforce there. Ubaidulloev was speaking at a Russian-Tajik interparliamentary conference. Specifically, Tajikistan wants its citizens who were deported from Russia to be allowed to work there again. Under Russian law, a person who is deported from the Russian federation cannot return to the country for five years.
“Tajikistan is an overpopulated country with a high birthrate,” said Ubaidulloev. “To solve the problem of unemployment, about 1 million jobs have to be created.”
According to the Tajik Embassy in Moscow, 450,000-500,000 Tajik citizens work in Russia. Nearly half of then (44.8 percent) work in construction, 16.4 percent work in trade. 6.7 percent in manufacturing, 2.8 percent in transportation and 2.6 percent in agriculture.
The Russian Federal Migration Service opposes the amnesty. “The law is the law and we don't intend to stray from it,” Sergey Boldyrev, deputy head of the FMS foreign labor migration department told Kommersant. “If Russia indulges them, other countries of the CIS may raise similar questions.” In addition, the FMS opposes the Tajik proposal to create a Russian-Tajik labor exchange. At that agency they note, however, that a bill is expected to pass the State Duma that will allow Russian employment agencies to hire workers in other CIS countries. The Russian government has repeatedly spoken about the need to import labor from the neighboring countries to offset Russia's demographic problems. Ubaidulloev stated that the country' proposals will be presented to Russian President Vladimir Putin when he visits Dushanbe this autumn
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 18, 2007
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