According to the Financial Times, several hundred Russian IT specialists, engineers, startup founders and digital nomads have moved to South America since early March. They went because of easy entry rules, Latin American countries' relaxed attitude toward Western sanctions against Russia and the region's high demand for skilled IT and engineering professionals.
"Latin America is the only whole continent where Russians can buy a ticket and just come," an ICESI University professor explained to the publication. In his opinion, most of the visiting Russians are not oligarchs or rich people, but ordinary people who have come to a new country even without having dual citizenship.
Experts have difficulty estimating the exact number of digital nomads from Russia, because South American countries do not classify Russian citizens separately. But local representatives of businesses, developers and human resource services explained that recently there have been many more Russians in the professional environment. Many are moving their small businesses and startups there to get a chance to enter new markets without restrictions and sanctions. According to experts, a Russian technology hub is already forming in South American countries and continues to expand.
Local experts explained that the Russians began to arrive en masse in Latin America in 2020, but since March 2022, their arrival and presence has become more visible, as they actively seek contacts and begin to develop their businesses or seek employers for their compensation back in Russia, and then improve their employment opportunities some time after the move.
On June 21, the Interior Ministry said that Russia currently needs about 170,000 IT specialists, a shortage of which arose after the departure of IT specialists from the country due to sanctions over the past few months.
On June 20 the head of the Ministry of figures explained that, according to his data, about half of the IT-specialists who left Russia continue to work for Russian companies for various reasons, including the already established culture of remote work.
On June 17, Dmitry Chernyshenko, the deputy prime minister in charge of IT, said without exact figures that most of the IT specialists who left Russia emotionally reacted and left, but for one reason or another they came back and there is something for them to do.
In early June, the media reported that the Ministry of Digital counted 80-85% of IT specialists who returned to Russia using a "mathematical projection." Industry experts believe that half of the IT specialists who left Russia may return by the end of the year, while some of them have already done so for various reasons.
On May 28 the media reported that the specialized survey and research of "Russoft" software development companies association showed that about 40 thousand Russian IT specialists are going to leave the country by the end of the first half of the year or have already done it. Half of them may come back when conditions for high-paying jobs appear in Russia.
At the end of March the Russian Association of Electronic Communications stated that up to 70 thousand IT-specialists left the country, in April up to 100 thousand more people were expected to leave.
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