“We intend to provide a clear procedure for making demands on those through whose fault illegal migrants enter the airport,” said Ruslan Fadeev, deputy general director for security of OAO Sheremetyevo International Airport. According to him, the airport administration will resort to such radical measures reluctantly. The fact is that in the transit zone of the airport of late certain people have been “permanently residing.” These include harmless transit passengers for whom airlines did not bother to pay for a hotel during layovers, and people who have applied for asylum in Russia and are spending the few days while their applications are considered in the waiting rooms, and people “with invalid passports” (or even without them at all). If last year 3,500 passengers failed to pass passport control because their documents did not comply with Russian legislation, then this year there are already 4,500 such passengers. Some of them have no way to return home, and while awaiting expulsion they also take up residence in the waiting room.
There are from 10 to 50 such “lodgers” in the airport every day: they sleep and eat right here. However, if transit passengers sooner or later fly away, and people with “invalid passports” are deported, though with great difficulty, then people who conceal their identity because of their unwillingness to return to their historical homeland live in Sheremetyevo for months, between passport control and the aircraft steps.
Vladimir Krysanov, head of the separate border control detachment “Moscow,” tells about one such resident, whom the airport staff simply call the Palestinian. The Palestinian destroyed his documents long ago, hides his name, as well as the route by which he entered the transit zone (many illegal migrants destroy their passports right on board the plane). The Palestinian has been living in Sheremetyevo for about a year; several months ago two Iraqis joined him. Russia refused to accept them, but there is nowhere to send them. Representatives of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees do not lose hope that the Iraqis will be able to be placed in Canada, but so far they all live at the airport’s expense. “As a result, nobody needs them, and we are forced to answer for them,” said Ruslan Fadeev. “Therefore, first of all, we need to limit or even completely exclude the arrival at the airport of people with unclear purposes. Airline offices must either screen them out when selling tickets, or fine them.”
“Russia is a country for which the so-called transit migration is typical,” says Sergei Brestovitsky, coordinator of programs at the Moscow office of the International Organization for Migration. “Residents of Asian and African countries head in transit through Russia to prosperous Europe, but a certain percentage settles here. However, it is extremely necessary to solve the problems of those who have found themselves in limbo, and until their fate is decided, to provide them with normal living conditions.”
The only way out, with which airport representatives, migration service employees, and border guards are unanimous, is to create a “temporary detention center” for illegal migrants right at Sheremetyevo, where, on the one hand, to ensure their isolation (including, importantly, sanitary isolation), and on the other hand, to give them food and drink, and give them the opportunity to sleep and wash. Vyacheslav Kostometov, deputy head of the immigration control and asylum department of the Federal Migration Service of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, reported that his agency’s plans include the creation of such a center, and money has even been allocated for these purposes. From Sheremetyevo International Airport, they only expect the allocation of a place on its territory for the construction of such a center.