Who Needs a Russian Kafala System? The Russian authorities have embarked on a radical overhaul of the labour migration model

A conceptual revolution: from liberal views to the far right

Last October, Vladimir Putin approved a new Concept for Migration Policy for 2026–2030 by presidential decree. The first such document appeared back in 2012 and was intended to cover the period up to 2025. However, in 2018 it was replaced by a new version of the Concept (also covering the period up to 2025), to which a number of additions and amendments were made in 2023. Taken together, the four versions of the Concept (2012, 2018, 2023 and 2025) reflect the evolution of the Russian authorities’ views and, above all, apparently those of Putin himself following his return to the presidency in 2012. Over this period, the direction of migration policy has shifted by almost 180 degrees.

The 2012 Concept was pragmatic and relatively liberal in character. Approved by Putin in June, it had in fact been drafted during Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency. The document stated that 'the resettlement of migrants for permanent residence' in Russia constituted 'one of the sources of population growth', while 'the attraction of foreign workers … in accordance with the needs of the Russian economy is a necessity for its continued progressive development'. In this way, it recognised two objectives and two principal instruments of migration policy: (1) permanent migration and the absorption of migrants as a means of compensating for natural population decline, and (2) temporary labour migration as an essential requirement of economic development. The importance of the demographic dimension was especially emphasised: 'Over the past two decades, net migration has compensated for more than half of the country’s natural population decline', the document noted.

The 2012 Concept therefore proceeded from the assumption that Russia was a sparsely populated country experiencing demographic decline and was therefore in need of migrants who would assimilate into a new permanent place of residence and contribute to population reproduction, including higher birth rates, the maintenance of the domestic labour market and consumer demand, and the prevention of territorial depopulation (see box below, 'The Actual Results of Migration Policy'). Accordingly, one of the priorities of migration policy was declared to be the creation of conditions and infrastructure for the adaptation and integration of migrants.

In the 2018 version, adopted at the beginning of Putin’s next presidential term, the objectives of migration policy were significantly revised. The document stated that ‘the main source’ of population replenishment and labour supply for the economy 'should remain natural reproduction', while 'migration policy is an auxiliary instrument' for addressing demographic and economic challenges. The role of permanent migration as a tool for resolving demographic problems was sharply downgraded. This reflected changing attitudes within the Kremlin. In 2016, the Federal Migration Service was dissolved. Responsibility for migration control returned to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, while the tasks of attracting and assimilating migrants lost their independent significance. In 2017, at a meeting of the Security Council, Putin announced the relaunch of a large-scale programme to support the birth rate and families with children. This new strategic emphasis was reflected in the wording of the 2018 Concept concerning 'natural reproduction'.

The 2018 version also introduced among the objectives of migration policy the 'protection of the national labour market' and the 'protection and preservation of Russian culture, the Russian language and the historical and cultural heritage of the peoples of Russia that form the basis of its cultural (civilisational) code'. Migration thus came to be viewed not only as a necessary instrument of economic development, but also as a significant source of threats: to the language and 'cultural code', to the labour market, and in the form of 'criminal and terrorist' dangers, which were also mentioned in the document. In addition, the Concept set the task of 'counteracting spatial segregation and the formation of ethnic enclaves', which were portrayed as another threat associated with migration.

Thus, this version of the Concept already clearly reflected new ideological trends, including the notion of a 'civilisational code', and a new, problematised understanding of migration, while the principal emphasis of migration policy shifted towards protective and restrictive measures. The text of the 2018 Concept, which notably cited the European migration crisis of 2014–2015 as an example of the negative consequences of migration policy, reflected a transition from a moderately liberal to a right-conservative view of migration.

The amendments introduced in 2023, after the outbreak of the war, concerned the return of populations to the occupied, or 'annexed', territories of Ukraine and the migration of their residents into Russia proper, as well as the simplification of certain bureaucratic procedures. At the same time, within the traditional objective of migration policy, namely the adaptation of foreign citizens, the concept of 'adaptation' was substantially broadened. In addition to knowledge of the Russian language, it now included 'the assimilation of the legal consciousness and legal culture characteristic of Russian society', as well as 'familiarisation with traditional Russian spiritual and moral values'. This version also, for the first time, introduced the objective of 'increasing the scale of organised recruitment of foreign citizens for employment'.

Finally, the latest version of the Concept, approved in 2025, reflected the completion of the ideological transformation in approaches to migration policy. The opening paragraphs state that the Concept was developed with reference 'above all to the Fundamentals of State Policy on the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values’, while one of the objectives of migration policy is declared to be facilitating 'the resettlement in the Russian Federation of foreign citizens from states imposing destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes'. Migration policy thus becomes part of the 'ideological front': it is intended to preserve and strengthen the correct values while resisting the wrong ones. At the same time, international migration as a whole is treated more as an unavoidable evil at the present stage, the consequences of which must be carefully controlled and minimised.

According to the 2025 Concept, the main efforts of the authorities should be directed towards 'accelerating the transition to the targeted organised recruitment of foreign workers, primarily those arriving visa-free, providing for the possibility of employment with a specific employer for a defined period on the basis of an employment contract and work permit', as well as on 'reducing the unregulated segment of the foreign labour market' and 'restricting the stay in the Russian Federation of family members of foreign citizens'. In this connection, the Concept sets objectives including 'increasing employers’ responsibility', reducing pressure on the social and healthcare sectors associated with the presence of migrant workers’ family members, and limiting migrants’ access to 'basic general education programmes', i.e. at school, unless they pass a Russian language test.

The terror attack as a trigger: challenging the old model

The actual model of labour migration in Russia in the second half of the 2010s and early 2020s was shaped primarily by the fact that the main source of labour came from neighbouring countries whose citizens were entitled to visa-free entry into Russia. Citizens of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) enjoyed unrestricted access to the labour market, while citizens of other visa-free countries, including Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Moldova and Azerbaijan, were required to purchase work patents. In the early 2020s, according to Rosstat data, the first category, namely citizens of EAEU member states, accounted for 30% of all foreigners entering Russia, while the second accounted for more than 40%. The introduction of the work permit system led to the formation of a system of long-term labour migration that was not so much settled as circular, whereby workers repeatedly travelled to Russia for extended periods over many years. Between 2015 and 2021, around 1.7 million patents were issued annually, primarily to citizens of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In 2022 the figure reached 2 million, while in 2023–2025 it averaged 2.2 million. At the same time, according to data from the Migration Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 3 million migrants were working in Russia in 2025, compared with 2.8 million in 2024. The labour shortage, according to economist Nikolai Akhapkin’s calculations, stood at around 4.8 million people in 2023.

The 2025 Concept is quite explicitly aimed at creating barriers to permanent settlement and family migration through restrictions on access to medical and social infrastructure and the introduction of language barriers. It directly sets out the goal of replacing the existing model of long-term labour migration, above all the ‘visa-free entry + work permit’ model, with a system of organised ‘rotational’ migration under which workers enter the country in response to approved requests from specific employers for a fixed period, after which they leave the country and no longer enjoy independent access to the labour market.

Although the new approach was only approved at a conceptual level at the end of last year, in practice the transition to the new migration policy began earlier, following the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall in April 2024. Despite the fact that the attack represented a failure of the Russian security services, which ignored warnings from foreign intelligence agencies, responsibility was to a considerable extent shifted onto the existing model of labour migration and, more broadly, onto labour migrants from Central Asia (→ Re:Russia: Authoritarian Dysfunction). However, as the evolution of Russian migration policy demonstrates, the attack fell on fertile ground created by the ideological turn in the Kremlin’s approach to migration that had already been under way.

Following the attack, alongside mass raids and sweeps conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which according to the ministry resulted in the expulsion of more than 100,000 migrants from Russia in 2024, the authorities moved rapidly to tighten migration legislation. New provisions regulating the deportation of migrants were adopted, the powers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to issue deportation orders were expanded, and the permitted period of visa-free stay was reduced from 180 to 90 days. At the end of 2024, State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin reported that 13 legislative amendments restricting migrants had been adopted (→ Re:Russia: Migration-Occupation Balance). Furthermore, a wave of restrictions imposed by local authorities on migrant workers in certain sectors swept across Russia. Regional powers extend specifically to the issuance of work permits (which are now also tied to a specific region), so such restrictions mainly affected citizens of visa-free countries working under a work permit (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Moldova). Quotas applying to workers from EAEU countries were also introduced, but via government decrees. These quotas were again reduced in 2025, albeit with numerous regional exemptions.

In line with the logic of the new version of the concept, a crackdown on diaspora organisations took place throughout 2024–2025, which anti-migration campaigners portrayed as little more than ethnic organised crime groups. Several draft laws restricting both the establishment and the rights of such organisations are currently under consideration in the Duma, notes the Uzbek publication POLITIK Central Asia. Aggressive raids on areas where migrants live in large numbers have become routine practice, including the involvement of ‘voluntary police assistants’ drawn from the nationalist organisations ‘Russian Community’ and ‘Northern Man’ (→ Re:Russia: The Union of the Kremlin and the Russian People).

The anti-migrant campaign of 2024–2026 is heavily imbued with Islamophobia. In particular, the media widely covered an incident in which a migrant was fined and deported for performing namaz in the presence of other residents of a hostel. The 'aggravating circumstance' was a prayer timetable and texts in Arabic hung on the door, which the court classified as 'missionary activity'. Nationalist online forums repeatedly advanced the argument that Islamic labour migration from neighbouring countries should be replaced by non-Islamic migrants, such as Buddhists, Hindus or adherents of other Christian denominations.

The expansion of legal grounds for deporting migrants has become another prominent direction of anti-migration policy. Such decisions are now taken through extrajudicial procedures, while Vyacheslav Volodin has promised that a new draft law will extend deportation provisions to 43 articles of the administrative code, compared with 22 at present. These would include the highly elastic category of 'violating public order', one manifestation of which has come to include the public performance of namaz prayers, as well as the similarly vague offence of 'disseminating online information that offends human dignity and public morality'.

Furthermore, even before the signing of the 2025 Concept, the authorities had already begun an active campaign against permanent settlement and family migration. During December 2024, amendments to the Education Act were swiftly adopted, introducing Russian language proficiency tests for school admission. At the same time, MPs blocked an attempt by the Ministry of Education to set the passing threshold at 30% and insisted on raising it to 90%, which is even higher than the standard required for school graduation examinations. As a result, many Russian children relocating with their parents under the compatriot resettlement programme also failed the test. For children from Central Asia, meanwhile, it effectively became a prohibitive barrier.

In March of this year, the Duma approved at first reading another threshold aimed at family migration, this time financial in nature. This proposed legislation would require every labour migrant bringing family members to Russia to demonstrate an income no lower than the subsistence minimum for each member of the family. In Moscow, this amounts to 22,112 roubles for working-age adults and 19,677 for children. In addition, advance personal income tax payments must be made for each minor child. If wages fall below the threshold or the tax is not paid, the work permit will be revoked.

On the brink of organised recruitment: will a Russian kafala system emerge?

Thus, throughout 2024–2025, the Russian authorities exerted systematic pressure on the visa-free labour migration model that had taken shape since the mid-2010s, creating additional barriers to permanent settlement and restricting migrants’ unregulated access to the labour market through bans and quotas. From the end of 2025 onwards, in accordance with the new Concept, they began constructing mechanisms for its gradual replacement by a new model of organised rotational migration (Russian officials sometimes refer to it as ‘return’ migration).

The new migration policy has two main objectives: (1) to replace unregulated migration with free access to the labour market with regulated migration, and (2) to replace visa-free migration flows from Central Asian countries with organised visa-based migration from countries further afield. The latter objective is linked both to fears surrounding Islamist terrorism and to the new priority of migration policy, which regards permanent settlement migration as an evil and seeks to counteract it. Whereas it was previously assumed that the shared historical and cultural background of citizens from post-Soviet states constituted an advantage by facilitating their adaptation, the new view is precisely the opposite. The preferred model is now the recruitment of migrants from distant visa-regime countries who possess minimal incentives or opportunities to adapt to life in Russia.

As early as the beginning of 2025, the Central Bank’s regional economic review noted that, because of regional restrictions on the employment of migrant workers, enterprises were being forced to seek labour resources in South Asian countries. The attention of both federal and regional authorities increasingly turned towards poorer countries in the region, including India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Nepal, Myanmar, and even countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Russian media began publishing stories describing how Indian migrants had settled in Russia and supposedly worked better than Uzbeks and Tajiks. Some examples appeared almost absurdly anecdotal. In Orenburg, for instance, a city located on one of the principal routes from Central Asia into Russia, several dozen street cleaners from Senegal were reportedly recruited because of an acute shortage of municipal workers. The Russian authorities nevertheless intend to place organised labour migration on a much broader footing, in particular through intergovernmental agreements on labour supply. One such agreement was signed during Putin’s visit to India at the end of 2025.

The Indian labour market comprises around 700 million people, with official unemployment standing at around 5% (although in reality, it is significantly higher), and average wages range from $200 to $300. In this sense, India does genuinely appear to be a potentially ‘unlimited source of labour migration’, as Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Manturov recently stated. However, according to market experts quoted by Vedomosti, the total cost to an enterprise of organised recruitment for a single worker from India amounts to around 170,000 roubles. Calculated on an annual basis, this represents roughly 14,000 roubles per month in addition to wages. Taking into account remittances sent home equivalent to the average Indian salary, together with the cost of living in Russia, an Indian worker would therefore cost employers around 50,000 roubles per month.

However, the number of Indian workers in Russia remains very modest. According to Boris Titov, Putin’s special representative for ‘sustainable development’, although the quota for Indian labour migrants in 2026 is set at 72,000, the actual number entering Russia will most likely be almost half that, around 40,000 people. In reality, therefore, the Indian direction does not appear particularly popular even on a very limited scale, and no one can say what the outcome of the isolated 'success stories' celebrated by the media would be if Indian migration were significantly expanded. Overall, the government-approved quota for workers from visa-regime countries in 2026 currently stands at 279,000 people, which is less than 10% of the market, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior.

More broadly, the organisational framework of the new migration model is laid out in a package of draft laws prepared by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and, according to reports from the ministry, was submitted to the Duma in early May. The draft legislation envisages an 'experiment' beginning on 1 January 2027 across all Russian regions except Moscow and the Moscow Region. Employers and workers will be required to register in corresponding Ministry of Internal Affairs databases and submit requests on the basis of which permissions to hire workers will be issued. Once issued, migrants will no longer be able to change either region or employer. The authorities also intend to prohibit all other forms of employment for foreign workers within the territory covered by the experiment, although it remains unclear how this would apply to citizens of EAEU member states, which formally constitute a unified free labour market. The exclusion of Moscow and the Moscow Region from the experiment nevertheless means that it will affect approximately half of Russia’s labour migration market. For example, in 2025, these two regions accounted for just over 1 million of the 2.3 million work permits issued (45%), according to data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Russia will therefore effectively operate under two different labour migration models between 2027 and 2029: one in the Moscow region and another in the rest of the country.

The organised migration model is used to a limited extent in other countries, mainly for seasonal workers, and forms the basis of labour migration regimes across many Gulf states under the so-called kafala system. The principal problems associated with applying such a model in Russia are fairly obvious. Above all, it reduces labour market flexibility. Employers will be required to declare their labour needs in advance and will not be able to alter the parameters of their requests during the validity period of the permits. This is likely to create particular difficulties for the service economy, retail trade, and small and medium-sized enterprises, which will bear the costs of organised recruitment and the burden of complying with rigid rules despite relatively small labour requirements and the need to adapt rapidly to changing conditions of supply and demand.

The inflexibility of the system, which runs counter to economic and market logic, will almost inevitably lead to the emergence of both a market for illegal workers (a problem that also exists in the Gulf states) and a shadow labour market. Companies are likely to obtain quotas for migrant workers through the organised recruitment system and subsequently subcontract them to firms in urgent need of labour. This practice was widespread in the 2000s, and it is strange to expect that things will be any different now, notes economist and migration specialist Olga Chudinovskikh. In a certain sense, the situation may simply revert to the conditions of the 2000s, before the introduction of the work permit system, which had largely legalised and stabilised the labour migration model.

The authorities’ hopes that employers will be able to exercise social control over their workers, and that the arrival of 1.5–2 million migrants from India and South Asia who do not know the language or local social customs will generate fewer social tensions than the presence of migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan who have worked in Russia on a rotational basis for many years, are also likely to prove illusory.

Be that as it may, the creation of the new system remains at a very early stage and represents a highly complex bureaucratic construction. Even if it eventually becomes operational, this will take several years. In the meantime, the aggressive and ideologically driven efforts to introduce it, together with pressure on the existing model, are already creating a 'cash-flow gap' in migration flows, particularly at the regional level. At the same time, experts point out that these policies are encouraging labour migrants from Central Asia to reorient themselves towards alternative labour markets, while the governments of their home countries are beginning to develop programmes to facilitate this process.

A structural labour shortage, exacerbated by war, the militarisation of the economy and military emigration, has already become a significant macroeconomic factor influencing price dynamics and growth potential, experts have repeatedly noted, including most recently Central Bank Chair Elvira Nabiullina. An experiment in radically changing the migration paradigm and creating a new model practically from scratch in such a situation appears economically irrational. This is hardly surprising, given that the initiative stems from a deeply ideological and right-populist view of migration, from a securitised mindset centred on 'countering threats', and from the lack of professionalism within the security apparatus, which makes such 'countermeasures' maximally costly for society and the economy. Under conditions of stagnation and the likely contraction of the Russian economy in the near future, labour shortages will probably give way to a significant reduction in jobs. Nevertheless, the radical decline in labour market flexibility will create serious difficulties for employers and impede any return to economic growth.