Ruginienė : Let's separate two things. If we are talking about minds and highly qualified employees, then there are no thoughts of stopping these flows. I think that we, as Lithuania, should be proud that we attract highly qualified people who can work here. But basically, when we talk about labor migrants, we are talking about people with low added value or low qualifications, they are the largest mass. Where our migrants come to work is construction, transport, certain industrial enterprises, where these people work in the lowest positions.
When we talk about low qualifications, then there are completely different stories. Then we also have stories that taxes are not necessarily paid, we also talk about the platforms that we had, when migrants register on platforms, go abroad and leave unpaid taxes. There are various stories, but I can be happy that movement between European Union countries is finally recovering and we have a number of workers who move within the European Union itself. It seems to me that we should encourage this, improving working conditions and increasing salaries. If we are attractive with our jobs, then people from other European Union countries will also come to work with us and fill the shortage that we have.
Most of the discussions are about the need for cheap labor from third countries to come to Lithuania and plug those holes. So what does cheap labor do? Cheap labor hinders the improvement of job standards and wage growth.
. Ruginienė: There are services here that are able to look and check as much as they can, and we have been discussing this in more than one discussion for many years, that it is necessary to limit migration, we are not talking about closed borders, because the movement of people must take place, but there should be a policy of controlled migration.
I. Ruginienė: First of all, two things. First, it is an absolute priority - highly qualified employees, who are actually quite difficult to train within Lithuania and, if such people come to work, their salaries are higher, and the taxes are of a completely different size. The second thing is cheap labor. Why do we say that migration must be controlled - we need to know when a person entered Lithuania, where he works, where he moves.
I. Ruginienė: We hardly have that exact picture and we don't have that unified information base where that data could come into play. The second thing is that we talk less and less about integration processes. Of course, our biggest priority would probably be for a person to come for a longer period of time, to pay taxes normally, not so that after working a little, they leave and forget to pay and maybe never return. Such people do not add value, but it is necessary for them to come, integrate, study, as the member of the Seimas says, learn the Lithuanian language and adapt to our society. Any person who comes to live and work in our country must know our system and adopt democratic values, but not to introduce their own.
https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/verslas/4/2473113/ruginiene-apie-tamsiaja-migracijos-puse-gresme-lietuvai-ir-nesumokami-mokesciai