One can be against war with Russia, against Ukrainian membership in NATO, and even be skeptical about NATO’s continued existence, but still cheer for Ukraine as it defends itself from Putin’s aggression.
There are even some peaceful steps that the western nations can take to punish the Russian government.
I’ve already written about sanctions against Russia’s oligarchs.
Today, let’s consider how immigration policy can be used to penalize Russia.
We’ll start with the observation that Russia is demographically declining. This is true for many nations, but Russia is in especially bad shape.
As you can see, Russia’s population pyramid has turned into a population cylinder.
The combination of falling birthrates and increasing life expectancy is very damaging to any nation with a tax-and-transfer welfare state.
Working age population will be less than 60% of total population at year 2051. Total population reaches its peak in 1993 at 148,373,584. The elderly population will account for 25.24% of Russian Federation’s population in 2100, population aging is serious.
So how can the countries such as the United States take advantage of Russia’s grim demographics?
Simple, just invite lots of young, educated Russians to emigrate.
To some extent, this already is happening, as Gian Volpicelli explained in an article for Wired.
Confronted with the likelihood of crippling sanctions, a plummeting ruble, and a country turning aggressively inwards, Aleks made it to the airport with his wife and hopped on a plane to Georgia, where he has some relatives. He was among the first Russian technology workers to make a run for neighboring countries at the outset of the Ukrainian war, but he soon realized he would by no means be the last. Over the past few weeks, throngs of fellow Russian techies have joined him… According to RAEK, a Russian technology trade group, between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers have already fled Russia, and 70,000 to 100,000 more could leave in April.
As you might expect, the Russian government is trying to discourage emigration.
Here are excerpts from an article in the Washington Post by Joseph Menn.
Russian officials are trying to stem the brain drain, dropping the tax on tech company profit to zero, offering reduced-rate mortgages for their employees, and pledging that information workers will not be conscripted before age 27, according to Borenius, a Finnish law firm. That promise backfired among some workers who have grown so distrustful of government that they feared it meant they would be drafted, said a Russian-born principal at a global investment firm that extracted its few Moscow employees.
The United States easily can counter Russia’s efforts.
James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal wants to allow lots of Ukrainians into America, but also dissident Russians.
…the president and the vice president…are missing out on a huge opportunity to do good in the world and to do well for the United States. …the United States is still only willing to accept a tiny fraction of those fleeing the war zone. …With the region now in flames, not all of the potential new Americans are ready to come here. …Private firms in various countries are already on the hunt for talent. And the available talent eager to live in peace includes Russians… Wharton finance professor Nikolai Roussanov has been noting the brain drain from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Heck, we don’t need to limit the invitation to dissidents. We can open the door to economic refugees as well.
There presumably are millions of young and ambitious Russians who would eagerly grab the opportunity to escape Putin’s dirigiste economy.
After all,Russia ranks a lowly #100 in the most recent edition of Economic Freedom of the World. and does even worse (#113) in the most recent edition of the Index of Economic Freedom.
And every young person who leaves would exacerbate Russia’s demographic imbalance.
By the way, this isn’t merely an issue of foreign policy.
It’s quite likely that an influx of Russians would be good for America’s economy.
Russian-Americans are not included in this chart, but I would be very surprised if they were not among America’s high-earning immigrant communities.
I realize that immigration is a divisive issue in the United States. But I assume that opposition is much lower for populations that are likely to earn high incomes and create jobs rather than rely on government handouts.
So it would be a win-win situation. The emigrating Russians would have a chance to become wealth-creators in America (win #1) and the Russian government would lose productive members of its population (win #2).
Actually, it would be a win-win-win situation since America’s economy would benefit from a more vibrant private sector (win #3).
P.S. To ensure that win #3 actually happens, it would be nice to keep Russian immigrants from getting ensnared in America’s dependency-creating refugee system.
P.P.S. Ukraine also suffers from bad economic policy. If Russia ultimately succeeds in taking over the country, the U.S. should welcome escaping migrants, especially if they are young and educated. One would have to imagine that they would have an anti-socialist mindset, much like Cubans and Venezuelans who also have escaped to the United States.
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Image credit: Nikolay | CC0 Public Domain.
