MOSCOW. Dec 9 (Interfax-AVN) - There are at least three million illegal migrants in Russia at the moment, a high-ranking official reports.
Russian Minister for Ethnic Policy Vladimir Zorin, who leads a government commission responsible for developing Russia's migration policy, announced this figure at State Duma hearings on Monday.
In 2001, a total of 283,728 foreign workers and specialists were registered in Russia who had found jobs, mostly in Moscow, the Maritime territory, Khanty-Mansiisk, the central regions, and West Siberia, Zorin said. People from 119 countries are in Russia, and both registered and illegal migrants come mostly from Ukraine (32%), China (13%), Turkey and Vietnam (7% each), and Moldova (5%), he said.
Foreign workers take about USD8bn out of Russia annually, thus causing significant damage to both the country's economy and security, Zorin said. "However, we are interested in using foreign workforce on the condition that, on the one hand, the migrants' interests, and on the other, the state's security are protected," he said.
The structure of migrants has changed in the past decades, Zorin noted. In the early 1990s, they were mostly refugees and displaced persons, but the level of labor migrants dramatically grew by the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, he said.