Integration and reintegration in CARIM-East countries

Abstract

Policy in the field of migrants’ integration is a relatively new task for practically all CARIM-East countries. Integration has an impact upon demography, including the composition and structure of the country’s population, namely gender ratio, mortality, marriage structure, birth rate, ageing etc. While integrating into society migrants become a part of the same, which affects the demographic security of the recipient country. As was noted above, integration is a twofold process, i.e. it is linked both to the adaptation of migrants and the adaptation of the recipient society . If one takes Russia as an example of a recipient country, then, in the first half of the 1990s, its actions were primarily directed towards assistance to refugees and forced migrants from the former USSR republics, most of whom were ethnic Russians in need of economic, social and household integration: assistance in getting housing, jobs, and legal status. In the late 1990s and the early 2000s the situation changed: forced migration gradually gave way to large-scale labor migration from practically all CIS countries and this, of course, required a drastic change in policy. The absence of migrants’ integration policy increases their social exclusion and segregation. This absence make them vulnerable to different forms of rights violations, labor and other types of exploitation, even extreme forms of violence, such as forced labor and human trafficking: all of these, it should be noted, are to be found in CARIM-East countries.