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Old June 7th, 2007 #1
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Join Date: May 2007
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Thumbs up Mayor Of Moscow Cracks Down On Migrant Workers

At a meeting yesterday of the Moscow city government, Mayor Yury Luzhkov announced the launch of a massive campaign to decrease the number of migrants in Moscow. Mr. Luzhkov's announcement came a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin let the mayor know that he can expect to be reappointed for another term in office. In the migration program scheduled to be rolled out in Moscow in 2008-2010, the police will be given total control over guest workers, and acitizens will face fines for renting living space to illegal migrants. Mr. Luzhkov also plans to slash the quota for foreign workers by half. The mayor's initiative runs completely counter to the federal government's policy of attracting migrants to Russia.

The main topic on the agenda of yesterday's city government meeting was the migration program put together by the mayor's office for 2008-2010. The program's main goal is to decrease the number of migrant laborers in the city, including those who have official permission to work in Moscow (from the current 810,000 to 500,000). The mayor plans to accomplish this with the help of repressive measures and controls on both legal and illegal migrants. To that end, the authorities in the capital propose to change the federal law regulating the migration of foreigners to Russia in order to "get data about entries and exits [of foreigners] in real time."They have also suggested an addition to the Russian criminal code, "Illegal transport of foreign citizens onto the territory of the Russian Federation," that would make it a crime to "abet illegal migration." The mayor's office also plans to amend the Russian Code of Administrative Violations to add the threat of fines for "providing living space to illegal migrants," although no concrete penalties for violations have been specified. Responsibility for enforcing the new measures is being given to the Moscow police, who are being told "step up" checks on places where guest workers live. The city government is planning to enlist the cooperation of Social Security, to which, according to the text of the program documents, native Muscovites will be encouraged to complain about their foreign neighbors. A census of migrants living in Moscow is also planned, and the data will be put into a special database. Finally, "with the goal of creating conditions for the return of foreign diasporas to their homelands," the mayor will enlisting the aid of their embassies. The planned budget for the program is 1.2 billion rubles, only 113 million of which will come from the municipal budget. The mayor's office is counting on collecting the rest from people who employ migrant laborers. For example, some of that money might come from compulsory medical certificates for migrants: according to Alexei Aleksandrov, the head of the Interregional Communications and National Policy Committee in the Moscow mayor's office, such certifications are necessary because 14% of migrants "are infected with dangerous diseases – HIV, tuberculosis."

In 2006, 1.26 million foreign citizens were officially registered in Moscow. In addition, there are between 700,000 and 2 million illegal migrants living in the capital. For 2007, Moscow has been assigned a quota of attracting 810,000 foreign laborers. Since the beginning of the year, according to data from the mayor's office, permission to work in the capital has been granted to 300,000 foreigners, although only 100,000 of them have found real employment.

Yury Luzhkov is a fierce supporter of the program to reduce the number of migrants in the city. During his speech, he often jumped up from his chair and waved his arms energetically to emphasize a point. He asked Mr. Aleksandrov "whether migration is bad or good help for Moscow" and, without waiting for a reply, declared, "it's bad help," and throughout the rest of his speech had no words for migrants other than "bad." "We need to make sure that these migrants contribute to the economic system of the city rather than overwhelming it. We don't need a single excess [migrant]," he said. "Moscow has a quota of 300,000 people; 100,000 are turning up at work, so that means that 200,000 are wandering around out there somewhere? Then we need to cut the quota by two-thirds."

In addition to slashing the quota, the mayor proposed compiling a list of the professions in which Moscow needs workers, a list "that should be constantly trimmed," and declared the necessity of the registration of "one hundred percent" of foreign workers living in the "residential sector." Finally, Mr. Luzhkov instructed the Russian Federal Migration Service to tighten controls on employers in order to ensure a "one hundred percent unavoidability of putative fines." "Otherwise the program will tank," he declared. In his speech, Mr. Luzhkov went into detail in favor of decreasing the quota for migrant workers, using municipal construction manager and first deputy mayor Vladimir Resin, who was sitting next to him, to illustrate his point. "Here you have Mr. Vladimir Iosifovich, for example. On his construction site there is a large number of migrants. If we, out of the generosity of the Russian soul, give him thi-i-i-s big a quota" – Yury Luzhkov spread his arms wide – "he will use cheap laborers on his construction project and won't trouble his head about how to introduce new technologies." Mr. Resin preferred to remain silent on that point. In the end, Mr. Luzhkov ordered the program to be completed with his comments taken into account and for it to be presented to him for his signature.

Yury Luzhkov's initiative is cardinally opposed to the position of the federal government, which has charted a course towards liberalization of immigration legislation. Since January 15 of this year, foreign citizens have been able to inform the Federal Migration Service by post of their whereabouts in Russia, and it now only takes ten days to issue a work permit for immigrants.

"We need to remember that it is possible to ensure a [positive] balance of labor resources with the help of economic resources instead of restrictive measures," Federal Migration Service deputy chief Vyacheslav Postavnin told Kommersant. "Theoretically, migrants can be replaced with residents of dead-end villages, towns, and depressed regions. But they need living space, of which there is none in Moscow, so for right now it is better for the capital's authorities to correctly manage the labor force that is already here," he said. His opinion is echoed by State Duma deputy and National Security Council member Gennady Gudkov: "I can't understand what the authorities in the capital are going to do, when there is already an insane deficit of qualified workers in the [Moscow] region. After all, right now the only ones driving [trucks], sweeping, and building are migrants, largely our citizens of the former USSR." "This program is more evidence that Moscow is putting its own interests ahead of Russia's," said Mr. Gudkov. A Kommersant source in the presidential administration said, "everything that Mr. Luzhkov said is rhetoric, 'a five-minute hate break.' Anyone walking past a construction site can see that without foreigners, the field of construction will come to a halt, and that will destroy the basis of the high revenues and profitability of the construction business. Moscow has already been obliged to take a step backwards in the situation with the markets: with quotas, Luzhkov sharply limited the presence of foreigners in the markets, and then he was forced to change the rules of the game. He simply changed the name of the markets that need foreigners to 'fairs,' and the quotas don't apply to [fairs]. Also, the mayor of Moscow needs to remember that sooner or later in the struggle against foreigners someone is going to accidentally pick up (Moscow court sculptor) Zurab Tsereteli."

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It is good that Putin and Luzhkov have organized this crackdown. All Nonwhites must be removed from Russia, not just from Moscow. This is a good start. Materialist race traitors who sell out their people for a fistful of rubles, must be dealt with harshly
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