About 1 million foreigners officially registered in Moscow

PanARMENIAN.Net - About one million foreigners are officially registered with the migration authorities in Moscow and 1.5 million in surrounding areas as of Tuesday, August 27 a senior migration official said, according to RIA Novosti.

“We have a centralized database of foreign nationals. Today we have obtained the most recent figures: there is about a million of foreign nationals in Moscow and 1.5 million - in the Moscow Region,” deputy head of Russia’s Federal Migration Service (FMS) Yelena Radochina told the Ekho Moskvy radio station.

About 3.65 million foreigners are estimated to live in Russia illegally, she said.

Radochina also said about 93,000 Moscow job permissions were issued to foreigners in January-July. The number of officially registered migrant workers in Moscow stands at about 200,000, most of them are citizens of former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Tajikistan.

About 20,000 foreigners were expelled from Russia in the first seven months of 2013.

The head of the FMS Moscow Region Department, Oleg Molodiyevsky, said about 240,000 labor migrants are registered in the Moscow Region.

The recent crackdown on immigrants in Russia began after a fracas at a Moscow market in late July, when a policeman was seriously injured in an attack by a worker while trying to detain a suspected sex offender. Russia’s markets are often staffed by immigrants from neighboring Central Asian countries.

The Russian economy is heavily dependent on immigrant labor, particularly from Central Asia, but there is widespread opposition within society to increased levels of immigration.