Russia does the Japanese two-step on its demo-decline

FRONT PAGE: "Its Population Falling, Russia Beckons Its Children Home," by Clifford J. Levy, New York Times, 22 March 2009.

Step one: identify all of your racial kin abroad. Step two: invite them "home."

Russia spends $300 m in past two years to get a hold of about 25 m Russians living abroad.

No word on how many lured back.

Reality?

You have to accept non-kin. Hard for Japanese, but Russians with fairly long history of it.

Comments

[Louis Heberlein]

Will Russians require that the returnees attend classes to relearn the proper way of thinking and living like Japanese did a few decades back?

But that's better than a few centuries earlier when the Japanese abandoned fellows living abroad because they were contaminated by Chinese or Western merchants' thoughts.

Come to think of it, didn't some Americans get uptight about returning troops from the world wars because they had become contaminated by un-American cultures?

[Michael]

I'm wondering how long it'll be before they figure out that, if they're serious about stemming the population decline, they'll need to do something about AIDS.

[Kenneth Nalaboff]

I live in Israel, and the local papers here ran some articles last year regarding the Russian Consulate setting up recruitment drives to convince Israeli-Russian Jews (around a million living here) that left and came here after Gorbachev, to come back to Mother Russia. The same articles mentioned the same sort of recruitment drive for German-Russian Jews (who had often first immigrated to Israel, and then used it, like many did, as a springboard to North America, Europe, etc.). It was presented here as the Russian way of soothing their injured pride that was bruised that anyone, even persecuted minorities, had felt that the living was better anywhere else than the motherland, as well as getting back the Russian-Jews that represented a significant brain-drain (for some time, Israel had the highest per capita doctor-patient ratio in the world due to all the added Russian docs). It seems, however, to be part of general program of recruiting a younger generation to replace the presently aging one, and not just directed at the Jewish emigres. I personally don't know of any takers here. I would be curious to know how many have or will return and compare the relative percentages of those who left for financial reasons and those who left for political/ethnic reasons (like the Russian Jews). Is the inducement enough to attract either of those groups, who often happen to be one and the same?