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Authorities have started granting work permits to some six million illegal immigrants from the ex-Soviet republics that have visa-free travel agreements with Russia. But the workers would be banned from working in certain areas.
The countries the workers come from are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
An estimated 10 million illegal migrants from the ex-Soviet states are currently the main source of cheap labour for Russia's booming construction industry, and often take menial jobs that Russian citizens do not want. Many have faced harassment from law enforcement agents.
Now they are eligible for work permits and registration within ten days of submitting a package of documents including a passport and migration card.
Federal Migration Service deputy chairman Vyacheslav Postavnin says the procedures for registration have been greatly simplified by the one-stop shop procedure.
"We have reduce all the bureaucracy involved in the registration process and many foreigners will obtain legal status," he told a news conference. But in a move to fill vacancies by Russian citizens, employers have been given the right to dismiss foreigners step-by-step.
"I am not an economist, but our research both in Moscow and in the regions indicates that there are many Russians willing to move into the retail market. We are protecting our labour force, since legal immigrants are more expensive to hire than illegal aliens," he said.
Several experts agree. "This is a very progressive measure to legalise all those workers who have escaped economic hardship from their countries. We are talking about the unskilled and semi-skilled which we can consider beneficial to our economy," Sergey Serdioukov, analyst on labour policy at the recruitment agency Edward Kelly and Partners told IPS.
"Helping foreigners come out of the shadows and receive legal status, and putting them on official tax records would be mutually beneficial for the government and the mass of foreigners who had come looking for greener pastures," he said.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many people from central Asia have arrived in Moscow and other major cities in search of employment. Facing an acute demographic crisis, Russia, in turn, is interested in bringing unskilled and semi-skilled workers into its labour force.
Last October President Vladimir Putin ordered tighter immigration rules and a crackdown on illegal employment following a diplomatic rift over a spy scandal between Russia and Georgia. Hundreds of Georgian citizens were deported as a result.
Putin ordered the government to come up with a system to regulate trade at wholesale and retail markets and to tighten visa formalities for foreigners who break Russian laws.
Some 1.5 million civil cases were filed for violation of migration laws in 2005 and about 90,000 illegal immigrants were deported from Russia last year, a source at the Federal Migration Service told IPS.
The Russian government said in mid-November that the country was losing about 9 billion dollars each year through unpaid taxes from illegal migrants.
The work permit scheme now comes with tight controls. Effective this month, foreigners will not be allowed to sell alcoholic beverages and pharmaceutical products. From April they will not be allowed work in the retail trade and in the outdoor clothes and food markets.
Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov said "introducing quotas at the city markets, with at least 50 to 60 percent and in some cases up to 80 percent of trading space allotted to them will be appropriate."
Some academics question who stands to gain.
"Obviously the plan to evict migrants from the markets benefits large commercial chains. These measures will mostly affect the low income sections of the population that will have to buy foodstuffs at upscale supermarkets at prices 20 to 25 percent higher than at the outdoor markets," Rostislav Kapelyushnikov, deputy director at the Centre for Labour Studies at the Moscow School of Economics told IPS.
The State Duma has meanwhile unanimously approved a bill raising the fines for employers who hire illegal immigrants. Companies that hire illegal immigrants will face fines of up to 29,000 dollars per worker, up from the current maximum of about 10,000 dollars. (END/2007)
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