migration

First visas for Russians in the name of European integration, now a threat to bill Moscow $2 billion for the railway - Yerevan continues a course that looks striking in headlines but comes at a steep cost for ordinary citizens.

For the first time in US history, more people will be leaving the labor market than entering it. This is not a crisis. This is the end of an era.

Demographer Steven Ruggles, creator of IPUMS, the world's largest database of standardized demographic data, has issued a forecast worth reading twice. By 2040, America's workforce will shrink by 2.7 million people. Growth will not merely slow down. It will not stabilize. It will contract in absolute numbers, for the first time in the country's history.

The window is slamming shut. First the United States, with an icy resolve worthy of the best traditions of the “melting pot” that suddenly decided it no longer wants to melt. Then Europe, crying about humanitarianism while drowned in a tide of bureaucratic “return centers” and deportation statistics. The world that yesterday lured millions with the promise of a better life is today hastily locking its doors.

By 2050, Central Asia's population will grow by more than 30 million people, reaching nearly 112 million – and the main question now is not whether this growth will happen, but whether it will translate into an economic breakthrough or an explosion of social tension.

Who is growing fastest

The world has entered an era of great migration comparable in scale to the historical migratory waves of the past — and this process is only just beginning. In the coming decades, climate migration will become one of the main factors reshaping the political map of the planet, even as states continue to respond to it piecemeal rather than systematically.

Climate as a New Engine of Migration

The Hormuz crisis — flagged by Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2026 — has long ceased to be an oil story. The planet is one step away from a global food crisis. Fertilizer prices have surged nearly 60% in the first four months of 2026. Within six months, that increase will reach grocery shelves and farmlands from Africa to Southeast Asia. The energy crisis is morphing into a food crisis — and in vulnerable economies, food crises always end the same way.

When the flow of labor migration numbers millions of people per year, a three-day delay between a medical test and a deportation decision is no mere administrative detail. It is an epidemiological window in which a person carrying a dangerous infection has already integrated into the workplace, their household environment, and the transport network. New amendments close that window.

Context

When a state begins deporting migrant workers based on their names – Ali, Hasan, Hussein – it’s no longer immigration policy. It’s a political message, packaged in arrest warrants. Nearly 15,000 Pakistani Shiite workers have been expelled from the UAE without charges, without access to their bank accounts, and without the right to appeal. For each one, a personal catastrophe. For the region, a new fault line.

What This Story Is Really About

Interior Ministry statistics for the first quarter of 2026 sound stark and convincing: crimes committed by migrants have dropped by nearly 39%, serious and especially serious crimes by 44%, drug-related offenses by more than 60%, and murders and attempted murders by almost 28%. These figures are cited in his Telegram channel by State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, who directly attributes them to a package of 22 federal laws adopted since 2024 aimed at bringing order to the migration sphere. This is that rare case where "tightening controls" genuinely means "things have gotten better."

The figure is staggering. In 2025, the number of migrants in the European Union reached 64.2 million — approximately 14% of the EU’s total population. Within a single generation, Europe has transformed into the world’s largest migration space. And this is no longer merely demographic statistics — it is a political and social time bomb.

Record After Record