Russian migration policy is going through a period of serious transformations. After a long preparatory period, the Ministry of Internal Affairs plans to present an updated version of the Basic Law in the field of migration by the end of this year. The pandemic also significantly affected migration processes and, first of all, labor migration. The system of regulation of external labor migration requires a significant update of approaches to the interaction of its constituent parts, goals, and objectives in modern conditions. The need to move from a "reactive" policy (reaction to ongoing changes) to a program-targeted principle of building a system of proactive actions based on a real assessment of the situation, a balanced forecast of its development, goals, and objectives of the current and future migration policy is becoming more obvious. This research is devoted to the analysis of the current role and place of external labor migration. Insufficient attention is paid to the external labor migration in the domestic scientific literature, while this segment is provided with the most complete information base (Ministry of Labor of Russia). The article presents an analysis of the mechanism for reducing this segment of labor migration, its conditionality both by the scale of demand for labor migrants and by targeted actions to limit their presence in the country. The author pays particular attention to the territorial distribution of labor migrants by region, and their professional qualifications. As a result, it was concluded that it is necessary to improve the procedures for determining the need for foreign labor at the regional level and that there are no prerequisites for the transition from the system of quotas to patents. The models of migration regulation that have taken shape in the world include a similar set of tools that complement each other in response to changes in demand and supply in the labor market. Abandoning sufficiently effective instruments, such as quotas, which are widely used around the world, can bring immediate benefits, but ultimately lead to serious problems.