Many Russian Schools with Support from Teachers and Parents Already Excluding Immigrant Children, Ghettoizing the Country, ‘Bumaga’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – Last month, the LDPR proposed stripping the children of immigrants without Russian citizenship of the right to free public education, an action that many observers said would create more problems than it would solve and suggested was only a PR move by a party known from them (tass.ru/obschestvo/21787701).

            But an investigation carried out by the independent Bumaga news agency finds that many Russian schools are already refusing to take in such children, leading to their concentration in schools that do accept them and to numerous cases where older immigrant children don’t go to school at all (paperpaper.ru/shkoly-getto-vmesto-socialnyh-liftov/).

            Both of these consequences are leading to the ghettoization of immigrants, to slower adaptation of migrant children to Russian life and to a sometimes violent youth culture that already means that while there are fewer immigrants now than in the past, the problems they pose are growing.

            And while there are no statistics available on how large either of these trends has become, the Bumaga study of the situation in St. Petersburg suggests that both are large and growing and will have a negative impact first on both migrant and non-migrant children in the schools and then on Russian society more generally.

            According to Bumaga, schools, teachers and the parents of non-immigrant children support excluding immigrant children because their presence means that teachers hthe goave to devote more attention to those who do not know Russian well and that attention means that all the students get less training in the subjects the government will test them on.

            If the children do less well, school directors and teachers will not receive higher pay and the parents of all children will do less well on the tests and thus have fewer opportunities to go on to higher education.  Consequently, there is a large group of people who oppose admitting children of non-citizenship immigrants to the schools.

            The solution, Bumaga says, activists and experts say, is to establish special schools for immigrants so as to provide them with the training in the Russian language they need if they are to remain in Russia. But some acknowledge that there is a danger that setting up such schools could also lead to ghettoization as well.