Between the Eurasian and European subsystems: migration and migration policy in the CIS and Baltic Countries in the 1990s—2020s

Abstract

The article analyses migration from border countries (the so-called overlapping area) of two migration subsystems — Eurasian (centred in the Russian Federation) and European (the European Union) from 1991 to 2021 (before the recent events in Ukraine). A step-by-step analysis of the migration situation in the countries of the former USSR — Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine and Estonia was conducted. The article examines bilateral and multilateral migration processes, analyses the main factors influencing their development and explores migration policy measures and their impact on the regulation of migration processes in the countries of the overlapping area. These countries, located between the two centres of major migration subsystems in Eurasia (Eurasian and European, or, in other words, between the Russian Federation and the core of the EU), are subject to their strong influence and ‘competitive gravitation’. The strength of this gravitation depends not only on pull and push factors but also on the attractiveness and non-attractiveness of the migration policies prevailing in these migration subsystems at a given point in time.

Keywords

• migration subsystems
• migration processes
• migration policy
• forced migration
• labour migration