If Armenia ever decided to adapt "A West Side Story," it's conceivable that “I Like to Be in America” might well be changed into “I Like to Be in Russia" to describe the choices faced by thousands of Armenian migrants each year.
But those choices are slightly less tempting now. A controversial Russian state program that grants jobs and citizenship to foreign nationals from former Soviet republics has stopped accepting applications from Armenians, Armenian news sources report.
Grappling with the double whammy of a low birthrate and a population exodus, Yerevan repeatedly has urged Moscow to stop the program, called Compatriots, which Armenian officials say has become a floodgate for emigration.
“We have a serious demographic problem in Armenia… and the organized outflow of the population is a blow to our national interests,” Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisian said of the program last month.
According to official numbers, some 26,000 Armenians have applied for the program since its start in 2007; 2,500 have actually left for Russia.
Gone to the West, everyone with brains; gone to Russia, everyone with brawn, believes one prominent Armenian intellectual. (Apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary.)
But many others are not going anywhere at all, rejoined President Serzh Sargsyan at a July 20 cabinet meeting. While expressing concern about migration rates, Sargsyan also called for a cautious interpretation of the data. Predictions of a mass exodus only provide grit for the enemy’s (read, Azerbaijan's) mill, he said.
“[S]ome say 45,000 people have left Armenia [this year], but had someone taken the trouble to look at this rate on a monthly or quarterly basis, he would clearly see that in October-November period of this year… 40,000 of those who left will come back,” the president said.
Where international data is concerned, though, the numbers don't look pretty. The Central Intelligence Agency’s 2011 migration ranking puts Armenia in 186th place out of 202 countries with a net migration rate of - 3.76 per 1,000 people. That's far worse than Azerbaijan (-1.14), but a tad better than Georgia (-4.06).
The United Nations gives a similarly stark long-term view; an estimated 700,000 to 1.3 million people emigrated from Armenia between 1991 and 2009, it says.
For a country with a population of just 3.2 million, those numbers spell trouble. To keep the population in place, some critics advise that the government put reforms in place for a stronger rule of law and a healthier economy.
