Poll: More than 40% of Russian youth want to leave Russia
A new data obtained from the survey conducted by the “Levada Center” in January states that 41% of young people aged 18 to 24 would like to emigrate from Russia.
In the country as a whole, the percentage of those, wishing to emigrate is smaller- 17%, and this number practically has not changed in recent years. However, among young people, the rate is twice as high as the “average sample”, state sociologists.
Among Russians aged 25 to 39, 24% expressed the desire to emigrate, and among those over 40 years old- no more than 13%.
“Emigration sentiments” were more pronounced in those respondents who would like to participate more actively in politics (24% versus 14% among those distancing themselves from the political sphere), and those surveyed who did not feel protected by the law (21% versus 10%).
Residents of Moscow are thinking about emigration more often. There 21% of those who wish to leave in the capital, comparing to 11% of the population in villages and provinces.
The survey shows that every fifth person in the Russian Federation has relatives and friends who have moved to a permanent residence abroad in the last two or three years.
The issue is not that Russians massively want to emigrate, but that the country is losing the most sought-after professionals in high-tech industries, showed the study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group (BGC) last May.
According to the BCG, almost two-thirds of potential emigrants from the Russian Federation (65%) are “IT talents”, specialists in artificial intelligence, scrum masters, designers of user interfaces, etc.
The desire to work abroad was expressed by 50% of Russian scientists, 52% of senior managers, and 54% of IT specialists. 49% of engineering specialists and 46% of doctors would be willing to join them.
The “real drain of brains” from Russia, calculated on the basis of statistics from host countries, was almost seven times higher than the official figure from Rosstat, Russian Federal State Statistics Service. Last year RANEPA experts wrote that every year 100 thousand people leave the Russian Federation to move to developed countries, while the official figure from the Russian statistics show only 15.5 thousand people a year.
Russia remains unable to compete for talents in the global labor market. “The best specialists want to move abroad, hoping to improve their career prospects and quality of life,” which “can create difficulties both for companies and for the country as a whole in the conditions of the digital transformation of the economy”, concludes the director of the BCG’s Moscow office, Alexander Shudey.