Staunton,
January 4 – Despite a reduction in the quota for those who want to come to
Moscow, the number of guest workers in the Russian capital rose by five percent
in 2011, a Moscow expert says, but the number of crimes committed by this group
fell by almost a third from the year before.
That
decline, Elena Tyuryuknova, the director of the Moscow Center for Migration
Research, says, does mark “a turning point” in the often tense relations
between Moscow natives and predominantly non-Russian guest workers, but it
suggests that relations between these two groups are improving (www.rosbalt.ru/moscow/2012/01/04/929575.html).
The Moscow expert told Rosbalt that
she believes government efforts flowing from the draft concept of a state
migration policy – the government is now considering its approval -- have
played a major role undercutting Russian nationalists who often blame
immigrants for crime and those non-Russian migrants who sometimes turn to
extremist actions as a result.
Tyuryukanova says that the draft
concept “recommends differentiating the levels of administration of labor
migration” rather than relying on quotas alone as has been “the single
regulator in the past. What is particularly
important, she continues, is that it calls for the elimination of
“administrative levers” and hence “arbitrary behavior by officials.”
In addition, she says, the concept
calls for supporting permanent rather than temporary migration and, while opposing
illegal migration, urges “the legalization of those migrants which have lived
in Russia for a long time, are fully integrated, but for one reason or another
have not yet been able to obtain legal status.”
Another expert with whom Rosbalt’s
Darya Mironova spoke, Nikita Mkrtchyan of the Moscow Institute of Demography of
the Higher School of Economics, suggested that despite the progress
Tyuryukanova speaks of, the main problem is that “legal migrants are less
profitable [for business and the state] than are illegal ones.”
Only if employers are punished for
using illegal immigrants can Russia or any other country with large immigrant
populations hope to improve the situation, Mkrtchyan suggests. Russian
officials, like Olga Kirillova of the Federal Migration Service, say that is
what they are doing, but the number of cases they cite is still too small to
make a difference.
Last year, Kirillova says, her
administration levied fines of 344 million rubles (11 million US dollars) and
forced violators from 2010 to pay an additional 92 million rubles (3 million US
dollars), fines that may have affected some individual employers but hardly the
economy as a whole.
But pressure to do something about
illegal immigrants may fall if the current decline in the number of crimes
committed by guest workers legal and illegal continues to fall. During the
first eleven months of 2011, Moscow gastarbeiters committed 8,235 crimes of all
times, 27.4 percent fewer than over the same period in 2010.
Immigrants to the Russian capital
also were victims of crime less often in 2011 than in 2010. Some 3500 of them
were victis in 2011, a figure 27 percent less than a year earlier, Rosbalt
reported. Both these figures call into question the often emotional charges of
groups like the Movement Against Illegal Immigration.
Some of this decline, Russian
experts say, reflects official support for the inclusion of guest workers in
neighborhood-watch type organizations, but perhaps more of it, they suggest,
has come because both Russian and donor countries have worked harder to ensure
that migrants learn Russian, something that makes their interaction with Moscow
natives far less troubled.
But another new Moscow policy may
also be playing a role: all guest workers are now being fingerprinted, a
requirement that may make police work easier and at the very least sends a
message to migrants that they will be caught if they violate the law or even
behave in ways Muscovites don’t like.
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