The draft order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was published on September 28 on the portal for draft regulatory legal acts and proposes allowing Russian companies to hire workers from countries that require a work visa and work permit to work in Russia without quotas. According to the Ministry of Labor, employers most often use this scheme to bring in specialists from China, Turkey, India, and Serbia.
The list includes 186 professions and positions. For six of them, the employer’s field of activity does not matter: these are enterprise managers, programmers, and setup and testing technicians.
Another 180 positions are tied to the company’s main type of activity; the list covers 11 sectors in total — from agriculture and mining to industry, construction, and healthcare. One of the largest blocks concerns medicine: it includes doctors in dozens of specialties, midwives, paramedics, nurses, and male nurses.
For agriculture, the Ministry of Internal Affairs proposes exempting tractor drivers from quotas. For manufacturing, the list includes welders, milling machine operators, fitters, aircraft mechanics, and engineers.
According to the draft, construction companies will be able to hire welders, crane operators, excavator and bulldozer operators, and other workers outside the quota system. The new rules are being prepared against the backdrop of rapid growth in labor migration from India: the FSB recorded about 27,400 entries by Indian citizens for work purposes in the first half of 2026, compared with 813 in the same period of 2021, and by the beginning of September 2026 the quota for issuing work permits to Indian citizens had risen to 88,800 — about one-third of the total quota for workers from visa-required countries, which stands at 278,900 permits.
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