Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 14 – The leadership
of Sverdlovsk Oblast has announced its intention to build “a separate little
city” for immigrant workers because their numbers are rising to build the facilities
needed for Ekaterinburg’s pursuit of international sport competitions like
Expo-2020 and the soccer world championship.
Valery Slovetsky, in an article on the
“Svobodnaya pressa” portal yesterday, reported that local residents have
already christened this planned development as “the ghetto” for gastarbeiters.
It will be located in the city’s Koltsovo microrayon not far from the
international airport and will be thrown up as quickly as possible (svpressa.ru/society/article/64225/).
In
this special district, Slovetsky continues, immigrants will be examined for
health problems and drug up and tested with regard to their Russian language
knowledge. And they will have their own special educational institutions, where
their integration with Russian society will be promoted.
The idea of such a ghetto in
Sverdlovsk oblast was first proposed “several years ago,” the “Svobodnaya
pressa” journalist says, but it did not go very far between there was a
conflict over who would control it between the oblast’s migration center and
the owner of the land involved, the interior ministry branch for the oblast.
Moreover, at that time, many
residents “expressed concerns that such a little city could be converted into a
place which would live by its own laws and become a center of crime.” Now,
however, both residents and officials appear to have changed their minds, given
the rapid influx of immigrant workers there.
According to official data, there
were 12 percent more immigrants in Sverdlovsk during 2012 than there had been
in 2011, and they committed “11,000 infractions of immigration law.” Most were from Tajikistan, but others came from
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, China, and Azerbaijan.
Aleksandr Kuzmin, a senior scholar
at the Institute of Economics of the Urals branch of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, says that the influx of immigrant workers shows no sign of slowing
and that “40 years from now, immigrants may form a third of the population” of
the Middle Urals region.
There appears to be a great deal of
interest in other parts of the Russian Federation to do just what Sverdlovsk
oblast now plans, even though President Vladimir Putin last fall said that he
opposed the appearance of ethnic “enclaves”
in major Russian cities and viewed them as an obstacle rather than a means to
the integration of non-Russians.
In July 2012, Sergey Litvinenko, the procurator of
St. Petersburg, said he supported creating such a place in his oblast, and in
October, Veniamin Rodnyansky, a member of the Social Chamber, said it was now
time to “think about the possibility of ‘localizing’ labor migrants” in this
way.
Public pressure to “do something”
about migrants does appear to be growing in Russia. Last week, Stepan Lvov, the
head of social-political research at VTsIOM, a polling agency with close ties
to the authorities, said that in Moscow, the percentage of gastarbeiters in the
population “had risen to 20 percent,” a figure twice what other experts have
called “a critical level.”
Valery Khomyakov, director of the
Moscow Agency for Applied and Regional Policy, added that this influx was
putting “a colossal burden” on city services, including hospitals and schools,
which Russians were paying for and which the immigrants, who often do not pay
taxes, were not. In addition, he said, “the
level of criminality is growing.”
He suggested that the appearance of
ethnic enclaves was almost universal in developed countries, and he added that
both government officials and business leaders in their pursuit of cheap labor
would continue to add to the number of immigrants and support building “ghettos”
because that would be “profitable” and appear to be a solution to all problems.
“Alas,” Khomyakov continued, Russia’s
borders haven’t been closed, “ghettos will begin to be created one after
another,” and tensions between their residents and the local population are
only likely to rise. But “for the authorities,
the current situation is profitable and they are not thinking about the
consequences.”
This new willingness among Russians
and Russian officials to consider the construction of “ghettos,” of course, is part of broader efforts to clamp
down on immigrants, including the use of Cossacks and civilian patrols to
monitor members of those groups and ever broadening appeals for introducing a
visa regime for Central Asians and South Caucasians (islamrf.ru/news/russia/rusnews/26169/, www.rosbalt.ru/main/2013/02/13/1093638.html
and www.bigcaucasus.com/events/topday/13-02-2013/82418-migranty_center-0/).
And the absence
so far of expressions of international outrage against such moves, just like
the failure of Western countries to condemn the introduction of the term “persons
of Caucasus nationality” in the 1990s, is likely both to convince Russians that
taking such steps is acceptable and thereby increase rather than reduce the
possibility of new tragedies ahead.
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