Russia plans to introduce a registry for the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of migrants

The Russian authorities plan to launch a registry of controlled persons for labor migrants starting in 2025.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, there are currently about 630,000 illegal migrants in Russia. To encourage them to leave the country, the government plans to launch a registry of controlled persons starting in 2025. However, there are no regulatory documents describing its parameters yet.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs also noted that the number of labor migrants who were in Russia legally in 2023 does not exceed 3.5 million people. Most of them are natives of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. 

Earlier in June, the State Duma of Russia adopted a bill tightening the regime for migrants in the Russian Federation. The bill also proposed the creation of a registry. The President of Russia signed this document on August 8. The registry is set to come into effect on February 5, by which time, among other things, the registry should also be launched.

The registry will include individuals who are in an illegal situation mainly due to violations of the stay regime, two or more administrative violations, or illegal labor activity.

However, the First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Alexander Gorovoy believes that it is impossible to create a registry in the current situation.

“If we were to include them all in the registry at once, no IT infrastructure could handle it. It would be wiser to first conduct an amnesty for those who have committed relatively minor offenses,” he noted.

This proposal could be supported by the FSB, noted the head of the FSB counterintelligence service Vladislav Menshikov.

At the same time, the authorities propose to further worsen the situation for migrants. Thus, the Deputy Head of the Federal Tax Service Svetlana Bondarchuk suggested including contributions for pension and social insurance in the cost of work patents for migrants—this would increase the cost from 7,500 rubles to approximately 30,000 rubles.

Moreover, in just the first quarter of 2024, labor migrants contributed 24.1 billion rubles to regional budgets in the form of monthly patent payments (compared to 20.9 billion rubles in the same period in 2023), and for the entire past year, the amount exceeded 106.7 billion rubles.