By banning 'rubber apartments' and closing entry to foreigners who previously violated migration legislation, lawmakers paid insufficient attention to the question of how all this should work in practice. The experience of St. Petersburg, which has gone much further than other regions in creating an effective system for controlling migration flows, can apparently help in finding solutions.
St. Petersburg's 'Unified Migration Center' (UMC), which opened in 2010, is the first and so far only project in Russia to create the civilized system for regulating labor migration that is talked about from the highest rostrums today. If you look at the center's work from the perspective of an ordinary citizen, you have to admit that it largely addresses the key complaints that society has about migrant workers. Foreign citizens not only apply to the UMC for work permits or patents, but also undergo mandatory testing of their knowledge of the Russian language, a full medical examination at the medical center located on site, and in addition, their photographs and fingerprints are entered into a unified information database accessible to law enforcement agencies.
The center receives up to 3,000 people per day, and one of the main complaints from residents about its work is the huge queues of newcomers on Krasnogo Tekstilshchika Street. However, all processes are highly automated, information is entered into a computer, and for each migrant, essentially a whole dossier is created containing all data, including vaccination information and test results. According to the St. Petersburg UFMS, this has eliminated the market for fake medical certificates and reduced the risks of hiring foreign workers with dangerous diseases.
There is one significant flaw in this rosy picture. Only those who plan to work legally and obtain work permits within the annual quota established for the region apply to the Unified Center. According to the St. Petersburg Committee for Labor and Employment, there are about 250,000 such people. Another half a million or so migrants work illegally in the city. Against this backdrop, it might seem ridiculous to talk about any achievements. But it should not be forgotten that regulating legal migration and fighting illegal migration are two different, albeit related, tasks.
For example, in Moscow, the share of people who have undergone a medical examination among those who applied for work permits is only about 20–30%. In St. Petersburg, the situation was slightly better until recently, but in just three years, almost 100% coverage was achieved. In this sense, the experience accumulated by the St. Petersburg UFMS in cooperation with other government bodies is unique. Proposals have already been made to use it to create similar centers in Moscow and the Moscow region, as well as other large cities where migrants from neighboring countries mostly flock. However, this is still hampered by the imperfections of current legislation, as well as the voluntarism of individual officials who try to 'manage' the migration sphere according to their own ideas.
First of all, according to current regulations, a work permit can be issued without a medical examination, and obtaining a patent does not require providing health data at all. The merit of the UFMS and the unified medical center is precisely that they managed to make this requirement mandatory in practice. By the way, the law generally does not require a migrant to purchase a health insurance policy. Although that would not be superfluous. As shown by a recent incident with mass poisoning of workers in Pulkovo, 97 out of 250 people hospitalized were processed through the Migration Center and had health insurance, which allowed the city to reimburse their treatment costs. Maintaining a unified information database is generally a purely St. Petersburg know-how, not provided for by law, despite the obvious usefulness of such an innovation.
However, many of the legislative initiatives to change migration policy that are being actively discussed today not only fail to eliminate existing gaps, but also effectively nullify the long-term efforts of the local UFMS. For example, the proposal to conduct medical examinations of migrants in their home countries – the quality of such reports is easy to imagine. Or attempts to introduce a ban on employment in companies that do not have quotas for attracting labor, although Moscow's experience shows that this only leads to the emergence of unscrupulous intermediaries. As is often the case, positive changes occur not thanks to, but despite the general trend, and are easily sacrificed to momentary interests.
Gleb IVANOV,
«Rosbalt».