Immigration to Russia

Immigration to Russia is an entry process of foreign citizens for permanent residence in the territory of the Russian Federation. Under current law, after five years of residence, after the examination of the knowledge of the Russian language, immigrants can also obtain Russian citizenship. The immigration to Russia is regulated by the Main Directorate for Migration Affairs.^[1] The immigration plays an important role in modern Russian demographic processes, since it is the cause of the increase of the population from 2011.^[2]

Russia maintains one of the world's most liberal immigration policies; anyone who works in Russia for five years and develops fluency in the Russian language can become a citizen, provided he or she has not committed a crime, and almost anyone who is hired by a Russian firm can stay in the country and work indefinitely ^[3] This reflects a policy change on the part of the Putin government, in response to declining birth rates, from the more restrictive policy enacted after the fall of the Soviet Union.^[4] The large non-Slavic immigrant populations arriving in response to Putin's liberal policy have sometimes been met with xenophobia; to counter this, the Russian state has shut down various anti-immigrant group pursuant to Russian hate speech laws, such as the Movement Against Illegal Immigration.

Immigrant population in Russia by country of birth

Citizenship of immigrants:^[5]

1	Ukraine	2,651,109
2	Uzbekistan	2,335,960
3	Tajikistan	1,105,500
4	Azerbaijan	610,327
5	Moldova	586,122
6	Kazakhstan	575,400
7	Kyrgyzstan	552,014
8	Armenia	514,663
9	Belarus	498,878
10	China	273,034
11	Germany	244,662
12	Afghanistan	150,000
13	United States of America	142,405
14	Turkey	111,681
15	United Kingdom	111,275
16	Finland	77,665
17	Vietnam	53,649
18	Italy	53,649
19	France	53,382
20	Spain	45,935
21	Lithuania	42,672
22	Without citizenship	35,489
23	Philippines	34,755
24	North Korea	34,217
25	Serbia	33,591
26	Canada	32,107
27	Georgia	30,718
28	Israel	30,126
29	Estonia	28,356
30	Poland	27,979
31	India	15,500