Armenian parliamentary minority demands discussion on growing emigration
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Armenian parliamentary minority demands discussion on growing emigration –
ARKA – Armenia’s parliamentary minority, represented by the Prosperous Armenia Party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), Heritage and the Armenian National Congress (ANC), has demanded today that the legislator discuss the problem of increasing emigration.
The demand was voiced by Aram Manukyan, the secretary of the ANC faction. He said the parliamentary minority has looked deep into a series of studies on Armenia’s demography conducted by international organizations and wants their findings to become available both to parliamentarians and the public at large.
Citing official statistics, Manukyan said that over 210,000 Armenian citizens left their country forever from 2008 to 2013. Manukyan asked parliament speaker Galust Sahakyan to choose a format to discuss the challenge.
Ruben Hakobyan, the head of the Heritage faction, added that representatives of the opposition toured the regions of the country to have a better idea with the out emigration. He stressed that emigration is not linked solely to the presence of the Diaspora and the Karabakh conflict.
“There is a whole range of problems that will show up in case of an honest discussion. The dismal results are obvious: where a school a few years ago had 30 first-graders, now it has only one,’ he added.
According to official data, the population of Armenia at the beginning of 2014 decreased by 9,500 compared with the beginning of the previous year. On January 1, it had a little over 3 million of permanent population, including 1.9 million of urban and 1.1 million of rural population.