Alexander Verkhovsky
At the end of the legislative session in late July, two laws were passed. The first expanded the list of administrative offenses for which expulsion without trial is possible, while the second essentially did not place restrictions on migration itself but made it easier to expel and deport migrants and tightened monitoring of them.
Dissatisfied with such moderation, A Just Russia and the LDPR subsequently introduced two bills – one to exile a migrant worker’s family should he be expelled or deported and another to put in place a federal ban for migrants to work in certain professions. Yet discussion of the bills will start only in the autumn – perhaps in the hope that by then the mainstream will radicalize and the legislation would have a better chance at passing than now.
The second law that was recently adopted is also interesting as it introduces restrictions on the civil rights of migrants. For example, they are not allowed to make any public demands on the authorities and must follow the whole set of “traditional values”: marriage only between a man and a woman, “the inadmissibility of distorting historical truth” about World War II and so on. Not that there is much opposition to these values among migrants. Moreover, today there are no signs that many migrants are openly protesting anything (though a scandalous report last year by Russia’s Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs, or FADN, said otherwise).
The only noticeable friction may be that related to some migrants’ adherence to certain norms of Sharia law or customs accepted in their home countries and localities, though the recent law does not mention this. An educational video released by the FADN in July does talk about it, though such instructions for newcomers are not new in themselves, overall they are quite reasonable, and strange norms in them (for example, not to whisper in your native language in front of strangers) aren’t many.