Sudden devaluation of the Russian ruble and the deteriorating economic situation in Russia did not spark an outflow of Armenian labor migrants, Gagik Yeganyan, the head of the State Migration Service of Armenia, told ArmInfo.
The number of the Armenian migrants having short-term labor contracts in Russia is about 100,000 people by expert assessments. There is no official statistics on labor migrants, Yeganyan said. He said the number of labor migrants from Armenia has not decreased over the last 4-5 years, even after private transfers from Russia suffered decline in 2004 due to the depreciation of the Russian ruble. He believes that after the increasing legislative pressure in the field, the number of Armenian migrants will not decrease. The point is that accession to the Eurasian Economic Union granted privileges to labor migrants from Armenia as compared to the ones from other CIS countries, Yeganyan said.