Marginalisation trumps integration. Russia’s State Duma pushes new anti‑migrant legislation amid pressure against rights activists

Five Bills with Volodin’s Subscribers’ “Opinions”

“Thank you for what you’re doing. But it’s clearly not enough,” reads the first comment under a recent post in the Telegram channel of State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. In this post, the official announced five bills toughening policies towards migrants in Russia; they are to be introduced for consideration today, on October 1.

The first point on the list is a requirement to recognise a migrant’s illegal stay in Russia as an aggravating circumstance if they commit a crime.

The second initiative proposes to classify the organisation of illegal migration as a particularly serious offence with a punishment of up to 15 years in prison.

For the manufacture and trafficking of false documents, deputies propose up to 6 years in a penal colony and multi-million rouble fines for legal entities. The bills also provide for the extrajudicial blocking of websites selling fake documents and prohibiting intermediary organisations from administering exams to migrants.

“All the above initiatives should contribute to bringing order to the sphere of migration policy,” Volodin’s message states, specifying that the bills were prepared “taking into account the opinions” of his subscribers on Telegram.

The government and the Supreme Court have already approved the bills, according to State Duma Deputy Chairwoman and Head of the Commission on Migration Policy Irina Yarovaya. At a briefing on September 30, she also proposed testing migrants for hepatitis B and C upon entry to Russia while reducing the number of medical organisations foreigners would be entitled to turn to for examination.

According to her, migrant children should be tested on their knowledge of the Russian language even before enrolling in Russian schools. “Because schooling is about acquiring knowledge and nurturing. Without knowing the language, schooling is impossible; it creates problems for the child who doesn’t know the language and fosters conflict situations in the school itself, creating difficulties for teachers,” RBC quotes Yarovaya.

These bills are far from the first measures against migrants adopted by Russian authorities over the past year. Since the beginning of 2024, over a dozen regions have introduced restrictions on the employment of foreigners in taxis and public transport, in retail trade, education, and other areas.

The anti-migrant rhetoric of the Russian authorities intensified after the terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow on March 22, which according to official data killed 145 people. Migrants began to be massively deported from Russia, detained at the border, and some were threatened with being sent to fight in Ukraine.

While residents of Central Asia and Russia’s ethnic republics were being attacked in “revenge” for the Crocus attack, in July the State Duma passed a law on the “deportation regime” for foreigners, limiting their visa-free stay in the country to 90 days, thus halving it.

At the same time, a “migrant registry” was announced for the first time. The list of “controlled persons” is planned to be made publicly available and include all foreigners whose legal grounds for staying in Russia have expired.

The Fight for the “Migration” Budget

Among high-ranking officials, the head of the Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin is more concerned about the migration situation than others, notes Carnegie researcher Temur Umarov. The IC chief has become “the main voice in the new trend of tightening migration policy”, he states.

“I think it’s a personal factor,” Umarov speculates. “This man seems to be generally interested in this topic; he sees in it some sort of, perhaps, his new mission in the new Russia after 2022. And I think, of course, there is also a confrontation between the security agencies over the Russian budget.”

Migration policy in Russia is not managed by a single body: the Federal Migration Service was dissolved in 2016 “and since then the powers have been spread across various agencies”, the researcher says.

“The demand to increase control over migrants means that budget funds will appear in this direction, and they can be fought over, including by constantly pointing out the mistakes of other agencies,” he believes. “And this is exactly what Mr Bastrykin is doing: criticising the Interior Ministry, calling the State Duma the ‘state fool’, criticising the Prosecutor’s Office and clearly letting everyone know that the Investigative Committee understands how things really are with migrants in Russia, and they need to be given additional powers.”

At the same time, Umarov calls the Investigative Committee’s statistics on the growth of crime among migrants this year a manipulation, since the number of serious crimes in Russia has been growing in general since 2022. And the blurred areas of responsibility of different agencies and the bureaucracy in the process of legalising a migrant are fertile ground for corruption, the possibility of which “exists at every stage,” Umarov is convinced.

“A person coming to Russia may face a situation at the border where they will be asked for a bribe,” he says. “Next, to legalise, a package of documents is needed. If they don’t have them, there are companies that can issue a package of forged documents—also for a bribe. Finding a person who agrees to register them [in their apartment] is difficult—and the migrant has to turn to people who have made a business out of it.”

There is also a corruption component in the relationship between employers and security forces: migrants are hired off the books, but at the same time employers “have [protection] in the form of some local police officer,” says the Carnegie researcher.

Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russian society was “increasingly accepting of newcomers,” and this was evident from polls, Umarov notes, but the mood of Russians began to change after 2022 and “changed dramatically after Crocus”.

“Everything related to migration policy fits into this ideological framework of the Russian state, which it uses to justify its actions in Ukraine,” he explains. “Russia has been waging war for the third year now and is increasingly talking about Ukrainians as a non-existent people. And, accordingly, the same lens is applied to citizens of other former Soviet republics. […] And we hear that officials have started talking about newcomers, especially from Central Asia, in such a dehumanising narrative.”

Russia “has stopped thinking in terms of economic expediency”, shifting the emphasis towards “national interests” as they were understood in the 19th–20th centuries. Therefore, even the recorded labour shortage in the country is not an argument in favour of softening migration policy, says Umarov. The problems in the Russian labour market could be solved by attracting foreigners and actively integrating them into society, he is convinced, but the exact opposite is happening.

“This is such a ‘brilliant’ solution of the Russian authorities,” he smirks. “We will not integrate [migrants], we will marginalise them, as if this will solve the problem. In reality, any marginalisation leads to radicalisation. And radicalisation leads to terrorism. This is a well-known fact if someone has ever opened any research on the topic.”

Pressure on Migrant Defenders

On September 25, the pro-war Telegram channel Rybar accused Svetlana Gannushkina, chairwoman of the Civic Assistance Committee that helps migrants and refugees and a longtime human rights activist, of ties to British intelligence.

82-year-old Gannushkina was “supervised” by one of the six diplomats expelled in September, Jessica Davenport, the channel claimed. According to it, Gannushkina “received money for migration projects through the British Foreign Office and reported directly to British diplomats.”

In a conversation with Agentstvo, an independent outlet, Gannushkina called these accusations “complete nonsense.”

“Lobbying for migration is absurd. I did indeed engage in supporting migrants, explaining to them how to comply with Russian legislation. A few years ago, Britain gave us certain funds for legal work, which was not forbidden at the time. The text of the agreement was posted on the Justice Ministry website and was mentioned in our report. We do not hide these connections at all, we do not consider them wicked, we have never received assignments from these people,” said the head of Civic Assistance.

The day after Rybar’s publication, a “Federal Security Service officer” came to the organisation’s office, but Gannushkina was not there. On September 30, she did meet with this official; he turned out to be an employee of Center “E”, a police department tasked with combating “extremism,” Gannushkina told Mediazona.

“He stayed with me for no more than three minutes, refused to have some tea,” the human rights activist laughs. “He took copies of the statutory documents and left. The questions boiled down to what our organisation does. I replied: consulting. He asked what I consult on. I replied that I tell [labour migrants] how to comply with Russian law so as not to make any mistakes.”

Gannushkina says she did not have time to ask the policeman on what grounds he was conducting the check.

The human rights activist also mentioned that recently four people have already applied to Civic Assistance with a request to “make letters of support for obtaining asylum in the West”—the head of the organisation calls this a “pure provocation.”

When asked to comment on the bills introduced in the State Duma, Gannushkina responds briefly and sharply: “This will lead to an increase in illegal migration, corruption and irritation in society, as always.” She emphasises that migration is a “trend in the development of human society” and it is inexpedient and harmful to fight it with “wild methods.” Moreover, in Russia, people “become illegals not of their own free will,” but because “that’s how the system is set up,” Gannushkina is convinced.

“Volodin surprised me, to be honest,” she continues. “A few years ago we met with him and discussed that one of the aspects of migration that worries me the most is absolutely unrecognised in our country: forced migration, we have an absolutely broken asylum system. And he agreed that this was bad, asked me to give him documents. I passed documents to him—through Ella Pamfilova, the one I knew then. They made some resolutions on this matter … You see, he understood it then. But now …”

The head of Civic Assistance “tried in every way to work together with the state”, Temur Umarov recalls. “She received presidential grants, she was a member of the Human Rights Council, Civic Assistance took on the burden that the Russian state was unable to bear: on integration, assistance to refugees, on constructing a better migration policy in the country,” he says.

Pressure on activists defending the rights of migrants is natural, admits the Carnegie researcher: “The same activity that was previously encouraged and even funded becomes criminal. Just three years ago they could [help migrants], and today it is no longer allowed.”

Editor: Anna Pavlova