Russia’s Commission on Legislative Activities approved a bill introduced by the Ministry of Communications on the reduction of the minimum annual salary foreign professionals need to receive on order to be employed by Russian IT companies, RIA Novosti reported citing a report by the committee.

“A minimum threshold wage of 1 million rubles ($27,404) per year has been proposed for highly qualified foreign professionals in order to facilitate the use of IT specialists from abroad by Russian companies. The existing threshold wage for skilled foreign workers of 2 million rubles ($54,808) a year is too high for many IT companies,”

the report states.

As previously reported by Digit.ru, the Russian Ministry of Communications put forward a proposal to lower wage thresholds in its strategy for the information technology industry in the Russian Federation from 2014 to 2020, and up to 2025. According to the ministry, the reductions will help increase the number of highly qualified specialists active in Russia.

At the same time, not all industry experts share the ministry’s belief in this approach.

Ilya Massukh, ex-deputy Communications Minister and President of the Foundation for Information Democracy told Digit.ru that the proposal to bring in foreign IT workers will lead to a drop in the quality of products, to the degradation of skilled labor and, ultimately, to the poverty of the Russian IT industry as a whole.

“One of the main priorities of the state’s Information Society program is the training of skilled personnel in the field of information technology. In this regard, the Ministry of Communication’s proposal to solve this problem by attracting migrants seems rather strange,”

said Massukh.