Demographers on the paradoxes of Muscovites' attitude towards newcomers: they need slaves, not migrants
Today, when everything is banned everywhere, there is a great temptation to solve the issue with newcomers just as simply. Muscovites, for the most part, will only applaud. By the way, politicians willingly play on these sentiments on the eve of various elections, while perfectly understanding that no one has ever been able to close Moscow.
As Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya said, residence registration for newcomers to the capital was first banned in 1958. She, then a student, was tasked with studying how much migration had decreased. "I won't tell you how I managed to get this closed information from the statistical office," she says. "I was a young girl – they gave it to me with a promise not to show it anywhere. Of course, as a result, my work was classified, and no one was allowed to the defense, but it was worth it."
So, before the closure of registration, Moscow's population grew annually by an average of 100,000 due to migrants. For one year after the introduction of new rules, there were fewer – about 60,000. But the next year, 120–130–140 thousand began arriving per year. How? Very simple. The director of ZIL came to the city party committee and said: either you allow me to hire 20,000 workers for new workshops, or you will have neither workshops nor products. Many other plant directors acted in the same way.
A little earlier, Stalin tried to limit Moscow's population growth. In the capital's general plan of 1935, he approved the city's boundaries within the Okruzhnaya Railway (now the Small Railway Ring) and – so that no more than 5 million lived inside the ring. But when they began to draw up the next general plan, it turned out that 3 million people had settled outside this "Stalinist" border, along the railway. In essence, this was also Moscow, but infrastructure did not reach there. There were difficulties transporting workers to Moscow factories, and the government was forced to expand the city's borders and recognize the "arrived" as Muscovites.
It would seem that the lesson should have been learned. Migration cannot be stopped by bans: it is an economic and social process. But even today, almost all state media and election campaigns work against migrants.
They primarily highlight migration risks and negative trends, which certainly exist, and almost do not pay attention to the positive. In the last State Duma elections, even the Yabloko party could not resist the temptation to play along with migrantophobes, releasing a video "Let's Clean the City" – later, however, justifying themselves by saying they meant household garbage.
As a result, say the study authors, the level of tolerance of Muscovites towards newcomers has sharply declined over the past ten years. If in the late 1990s Muscovites were much more tolerant of migrants than residents of Nizhny Novgorod and Smolensk (where the study was conducted), now it is exactly the opposite. However, if the results of the 90s seemed natural (the population of big cities is always more educated and progressive), today the capital's residents have become xenophobes and conservatives worse than rural ones.
"Muscovites' attitude towards migrants is mythologized," says Zayonchkovskaya. "Most have an idea of some kind of migration flood, although, compared to other capitals of the world, we have very few migrants. Of course, contempt for newcomers among the capital's residents has always existed.
After the war, I still remember, they were called 'village'. Then 'limita' [limited contingent], when the flow from the village was thus legalized. Now they are insulted with the terms 'black' [blacks], 'narrow-eyed' and the level of aggression towards newcomers is higher than ever. I think our rather poor social life is to blame. Despite the fact that we seem to have plenty of newspapers, various TV shows, many issues are not discussed, leaving ground for the birth of the most absurd myths."
Currently, a city potential rating is conducted in the world – Moscow is only at the beginning of the third ten. Why?
According to the conclusions of the bureau that compiles the world ranking, "the population of Moscow is insufficient to be the economic and financial engine of development for the whole of Russia." Because of this, Russia's development pace also lags behind.
This conclusion absolutely contradicts the widespread opinion among Muscovites.
"Muscovites want their city to be closed under a glass jar and for them to show off with splayed fingers in front of the whole country. But this is stagnation, a cessation of growth. It is a path down, not up," the demographer is sure. "Today, Moscow, by freeing up territories from obsolete industries, should give more scope for intellectual and creative work. And that means once again accepting migrants: talented people are not only born in the capital. To maintain the potential of the whole country, Moscow must accept these people, give them room to develop their creative abilities."
Zayonchkovskaya noted another paradox of the study results – its extreme inconsistency. Moreover, among the same respondents: "You ask, what positive do you see in the work of migrants? Only 10% answer something, the rest see only bad. We continue the conversation: who is renovating your apartment? Migrants. Do you register them? No, of course. Or: do you rent an apartment to migrants? Many say yes. Do you register them? No. And the same people say they fear illegal migrants the most.
Muscovites willingly use cheap labor of migrants, and if they were deprived of it tomorrow, attitudes would quickly change. But at the same time, they want migrants to sit somewhere like a basement and not come out until we call them.
They don't like that migrants walk around the dacha villages looking for work – let them sit and wait until we call them ourselves. These are new attitudes of Muscovites, completely uncharacteristic of residents of a large city. The only thing that excuses us is that there are not so many migrants in Moscow. Moscow's population is ethnically quite homogeneous: 80% of it consists of Russians. When we mix even more, I think we will become kinder."
Authors of the study "Protecting the rights of Muscovites in conditions of mass migration": Dmitry Poletaev (INP RAS), Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya (leading research fellow at the Center for Demographic Research HSE), Yulia Florinskaya (RANEPA), Nikita Mkrtchyan (HSE), Ksenia Doronina (INP RAS and HSE University). The study was conducted with the support of the Commissioner for Human Rights in Moscow.
Victoria VOLOSHINA.
Gazeta.Ru