On the impact of acquiring citizenship on some socio-economic characteristics of migrants and their position in the labor market

Abstract

The article discusses the possible impact of migrants’ citizenship of the host country on their socio-economic characteristics. The topic of the economics of citizenship (in various aspects) is extremely relevant and found wide coverage in foreign literature. In domestic practice, it remains poorly developed due to the lack of data suitable for such studies. Comparative analysis of the characteristics of migrants, usually migrant-workers, and the local population can be often found in the publications of the Russian scientists, but rarely investigated is the question of how the economic characteristics of migrants who have already become Russian citizens differ from those of foreigners. In 2019, for the first time in the modular survey conducted by Rosstat on the basis of the Labor Force Survey (LFS), information was collected on the migration status of respondents: their country of birth and duration of residence in Russia. Combination of these variables with citizenship made it possible to distinguish three groups of respondents: migrants who already have Russian citizenship, foreigners, and non-migrants. The work with microdata at the level of descriptive statistics showed, as expected, that foreigners differ significantly from other groups of respondents. On average, they are younger, less educated, have a higher labor force participation rate, and are more likely to work in labor-intensive sectors of the economy that do not require high qualifications. The minimal differences between non-migrants and migrants with Russian citizenship may be related to a large proportion of migrants who moved to Russia long ago. The significant shortcomings of the survey questionnaire, combined with a very low representation of foreigners in the sample (which does not correspond to their share in the Russian population), limited the analytical potential of the information. Identification of methodological problems of the LFS concerning the collection of information on migration and the development of recommendations addressed to Rosstat became a special task of the study. The main conclusion of the article was that the potential of the LFS is not used for a comprehensive study of international migration, and the inclusion of the migration module in an unchanged form in the program of the regular LFS for 2021 and further can make the problem chronic.