This is the editorial in this week's issue of the Sakhalin Times

Despite federal policies encouraging the contrary, the Sakhalin Region has been at the forefront of welcoming international specialists. Foreigners are generally respected in Sakhalin and face almost no harassment from the authorities. However, a wave of illegal immigrants from the Caucasus and China has not escaped the eye of the authorities. Following orders from Moscow, the Federal Migration Service (FMS) has decided to come down on all foreigners working on the island without the right documents.

Judging by the sheer rhetoric it looks like the FMS is painting an oil company executive working on a business visa and a document-less shuttle trader from China with the same brush. Such rhetoric and accompanying threats are completely short-sighted. The oil and gas industry is the backbone of the Sakhalin economy and the remarkable changes on the island over the last few years can be accounted to the Sakhalin Shelf projects. These projects cannot be implemented without the help of international specialists. Most executives in Sakhalin would be more than happy to obtain work permits for their skilled foreign staff rather than depend on business visas. But the whole process of obtaining a work permit is ridiculously difficult and time-consuming.

Instead of making it easier or at least more reasonable to obtain work permits, the authorities are trying to clamp down on the very people who try their best to get such documents. Each time Russian visa rules and policies change, international specialists are made to believe by the government that they are unwelcome in Russia. Ironically, illegal immigrants from China and former Soviet republics ignore all sorts of rules and make a decent living in Sakhalin. With open borders for most former Soviet republics and sheer inability to monitor the long border with China, it’s impossible to keep out illegal immigrants from these places.

In the case of immigrants working in the markets, the authorities have failed to take into consideration the fact that many immigrants have actually obtained Russian citizenship and it is illegal and impossible to evict them from Sakhalin. Even in the case of illegal immigrants, one just has to walk ten minutes away from the Sakhalin Administration building to see a row of Chinese cobblers and vendors on the streets. These people aren’t invisible to anyone but the authorities or certain law-enforcers who are “kept happy.”

There is so little coordination between different organs of power in Russia that laws often contradict each other. The Russian Government was supposed to announce relaxed visa, registration and work permit regulations by January 15, 2007 and now using ethnic tensions in Carelia as an excuse, new rules make getting visas under existing categories difficult. We are talking about a country with a growing economy but a shrinking population. If the present trend continues, we are heading for a scenario where the only people that will be available to fill job vacancies in the booming economy will be illegal and poorly educated immigrants from China and former Soviet countries.