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By David Averre
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There probably is no such thing, but if the MAGA movement were to design its ideal immigrant, the brief might read: arrive legally, have a job lined up before crossing the border, and leave as soon as the work is done.
This Trumpian dream could soon become reality in Russia, where the Interior Ministry is proposing a suitably authoritarian system to address historic labor shortages.
According to the proposal currently under review, Russian companies in need of cheap labor will contact a state-run migration service to enlist a specialist recruiter that finds foreign workers. Once a contract is signed, the worker is brought across the border and handed over to their employer, who puts them in designated accommodation and transports them to and from their workplace. When their contract expires, the worker is promptly sent back abroad.
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Russia’s first deputy interior minister and head of the migration service Andrei Kikot pitched the model to Vladimir Putin in a meeting at the Kremlin on Thursday. "A civilized method," Putin concluded. One wonders whether the White House might agree.
Even as Trump pursues a sweeping immigration crackdown, his administration in January authorized up to 64,716 additional H-2B temporary-worker visas for fiscal year 2026—almost doubling the regular annual cap of 66,000—because American businesses said they could not find enough U.S. workers and faced "irreparable harm" without foreign labor.
Home, Work, Home
The Russian proposal is simple: import the workers, put them right to work, and make damn sure they know when it’s time to leave. It's an awfully dystopian solution to address a very real problem.
Russian unemployment reached a historic low of 2.1 percent in May and now sits at just 2.3 percent, prompting Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov to admit earlier this month that Russia had become a "labor-deficit" economy.
The war in Ukraine hasn't helped. Putin said in June that more than 700,000 Russian troops were deployed in the war zone, and 200,000 people signed military contracts in the first six months of this year alone, according to security council deputy Dmitry Medvedev. An open-source investigation by Russian independent outlet Mediazona and BBC Russian has verified almost 250,000 Russian military deaths since February 2022, and warned the real toll is likely much higher. Meanwhile, the expansion of the defense industry has hoovered workers out of the civilian economy.
Russia is also aging, and fast. The country's most economically active 30-to-39-year-old cohort is projected to shrink by 6.3 million people by the end of the decade, and Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova says Russia will need to replace 11.5 million workers retiring from the workforce by 2032.
Foreign labor is the obvious move to revitalize Russia’s workforce. But, politically, Moscow has been moving in the opposite direction.
In a presidential decree issued in October, Putin declared that Russia’s "natural reproduction" must remain the main driver of population and labor market growth. The State Duma boasts that it has passed 22 separate migration laws since 2024, while Kikot told Putin on Thursday that around 100,000 foreigners have been expelled in the past 18 months, 75,000 of them forcibly.
Basically, Russia wants migrant workers, without the migration part.
...
The Interior Ministry thinks it can square that circle by replacing spontaneous migration with its newly proposed system, described on Thursday by Kikot as "home, work, home," that would be steadily phased in from next year. This is effectively labor-on-demand, where employers order workers from abroad and send them home as soon as they’re no longer needed.
The Duma is yet to vote on the proposal, but Putin’s enthusiastic response to Kikot’s pitch offers a strong indication of how that will turn out.
MAGA Meets the Market
The U.S. is not yet facing a demographic emergency quite like Russia’s, but the American economy is already precariously propped up by immigrants.
Foreign-born workers accounted for almost a fifth of the entire U.S. civilian labor force in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—a sobering reality with which Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric must contend.
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The expansion of the H-2B visa quota for this financial year mentioned earlier is hardly an isolated concession by the Trump administration. Last year, the Department of Labor certified 398,258 agricultural positions for temporary foreign workers under the H-2A program—more than eight times the 48,366 positions certified in 2005.
In some respects, this already looks surprisingly similar to Russia's proposed approach. H-2 workers enter for specific jobs and their immigration status is heavily tied to employment. Under H-2A, employers must provide housing and transportation between that housing and the workplace, while also covering return transportation under specified conditions when the job ends.
But America is not yet trying to reduce a migrant worker’s entire existence to "home-work-home."
Under rules introduced by the Biden administration, migrant workers who leave or lose a job typically have up to 60 days to find another employer while retaining their legal status. Eligible workers can also begin working for another H-2 employer rather than being forced to return home, provided the new company files the required petition on time.
Migrants caught in Moscow's emerging system would have far less room to maneuver—and the screws are already tightening before Kikot's proposals have even reached Parliament.
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The Worker, Without the Immigrant
A law Putin signed in July imposes brutal new taxes on migrant workers from 2027.
Many foreign workers already have to pay a set amount of Russian income tax upfront every month. Under the new rules, each dependent child living with them in Russia adds another 50 percent to the worker’s monthly payment. In other words, a worker with two dependent children will have to pay double the normal monthly fee.
That law was preceded by new education regulations last year that imposed much stricter conditions under which migrant children can attend Russian schools.
The Kremlin apparently regards such ruthless measures as progress. Kikot was happy to inform Putin that the number of nonworking migrants living alongside employed family members had fallen by 20 percent since the tougher school-enrollment rules came into effect.
The latest move from the Trump administration suggests conditions for some foreign workers in the U.S. could also become more restrictive.
On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed scrapping the 60-day grace period for migrant workers who leave or lose their jobs on a host of different visa categories. If finalized, workers in those categories would generally have to leave when the job underpinning their status ends—though the proposal says the 60-day protection for workers on H2 visas would remain intact.
It’s not quite "home-work-home" in Trump's America. Not for now, at least.
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