Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- A video bridge dedicated to issues of labor migration took place at the press center of Sputnik Uzbekistan. Experts from Uzbekistan and Russia discussed the current state of affairs and voiced prospects.

Digitalization of migration management systems is being actively carried out in Russia, and the regulatory framework related to attracting foreign workers is being improved. This was noted by Vladimir Volokh, a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Interethnic Relations, who participated in the discussion.

“We are implementing modern systems for managing migration processes. First of all, this concerns the digitalization of this process. I think that, just like other states, the Russian Federation is moving forward in the field of managing migration processes and improving migration policy,” Volokh said during the video conference.

According to him, in Russia it is necessary to improve, first of all, organized forms of attracting foreign workers. “Some work is being done in this direction in the Russian Federation. Literally in the near future, the State Duma is planning to hold a meeting of a working group that will consider these issues,” Volokh said.

It should be noted that in April, official representative of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs Irina Volk reported that the department had completed work on a bill tightening state control in the field of migration. The bill provides for increased control over employers hiring foreigners, extrajudicial restriction of the rights of illegal migrants, as well as a ban on government bodies, organizations, individuals and legal entities “providing any services to violators of migration legislation, as well as other decisions aimed at streamlining their stay in the territory of Russian Federation of foreign citizens".

At the same time, according to the chairman of the council of the Uzbek National-Cultural Autonomy of Moscow, Bakhrom Ismailov, labor migrants traveling to Russia lack information. In this regard, Uzbekistan and Russia need a new information policy in working with migrant workers, the expert noted during the video bridge.

He explained that labor migrants from Uzbekistan coming to the Russian Federation often do not have information about the procedure for staying in Russia and Russian legislation. “Residents of the regions of Uzbekistan often do not understand what threats they can face here - crime in the field of high technology, drug trafficking, and so on,” Ismailov noted.

He believes that since Uzbekistan and Russia are moving to a new level of resolving migration issues, “there should be significant changes in terms of information policy, both on the part of the source and the receiving side.”

“It’s simply trivial that we need to allocate airtime at airports and train stations, where we can convey to future workers, labor migrants in Russia, the most important information that will help them avoid problems in 90 percent of cases. And these can be trivial problems - late registration, failure to pay for a patent on time, leads to the fact that a person drops out, becomes an illegal immigrant with subsequent problems,” says a representative of the Uzbek diaspora.

Uzbekistan today does not rule out a decrease in the flow of labor migrants to the Russian Federation due to demand within the republic. This was stated by another speaker, head of the department of the country’s agency for external labor migration, Alisher Ruziev.

“Today, Uzbekistan is experiencing a construction boom and, naturally, our wages are on par with some facilities in the Russian Federation... Therefore, in this situation, there may be a tendency for our citizens to migrate to the Russian Federation,” Ruziev said.

He also said that over the past two years, the agency has significantly expanded the “geography” of organized employment for citizens of Uzbekistan abroad, in particular, due to the demand for labor in European countries. “Here you just need to understand the trends in supply and demand in the labor market,” added the agency representative.

According to official data from the Uzbek side, about two million people (about 20% of the economically active population) work outside of Uzbekistan, including about 1 million in the Russian Federation.