Investigation of demand for the foreign workforce in Russian regions using applications for quotas

In this paper we analyse the demand for the foreign workforce in Russian regions. We use the Russian Ministry of Labour (Rostrud) data on migrant applications and the dataset on Russian firms provided by the Bureau van Dijk. We show features of the demanded migrant labour and also find that the inflow of internal migrants significantly reduces the demand for the foreign workforce. The demand for immigrants is higher in resource and economically developed regions, and in regions with low population density. Most of migrant applications were proposed by construction and manufacturing industries. Employers prefer to hire low-skilled migrants with secondary education and with work experience of 1 year. Using the econometric model, we found that main factors of the demand for immigrants are the individual characteristics of migrants (education and experience) and their professional groups. We conclude that the Russian migrant quota system doesn’t pay enough attention to features of regions’ economies.