Judges Versus Migrants

Russia continues its aggressive campaign against migrants. In the fall of 2024, several relevant bills were introduced in parliament. In addition, deputies have proposed banning migrants from bringing their families with them, and the Ministry of Education has recommended limiting the number of children of foreigners who do not speak Russian well in schools and kindergartens. In some regions, migrants are already banned from working in certain areas: cabs, trade, health care and education.

From February 2025, police officers will be able to expel migrants from the country without a court decision for certain administrative offenses, such as “propaganda of LGBT and pedophilia,” drinking alcohol in public places and violating the rules of behavior at stadiums. For the time being, the pressure on migrants can be monitored with the help of court statistics.

For example, in the first half of 2024, Russian courts ordered the expulsion of about 86,000 foreigners from Russia — the same number as in the whole of 2022. It is likely that the total number of expulsions in 2024 will exceed the value of both the previous year and the pre-pandemic periods (after the start of the coronavirus epidemic in 2020, the authorities introduced a number of relaxations for newcomers who could not leave the country and extend their documents for legal stay, including a moratorium on the expulsion of foreigners).

Administrative prosecutions for immigration violations are on the rise. From January through June 2024, 124,000 such cases were filed with the courts. Most of them (about 100 thousand) are for violation by a foreign citizen of the rules of entry into the Russian Federation or the rules of residence in the country. Another 16 thousand — for illegal labor activity in Russia.

The amount of fines imposed by the courts on migrants is growing. In the first six months of 2024, foreigners were fined 590 million rubles. This is almost as much as in the whole of 2023.  

From January to June 2024, 10 thousand foreigners and stateless persons were convicted in Russia under criminal articles, 92% of them were citizens of CIS countries. Foreigners account for 4% of those convicted of criminal offenses; this share has changed insignificantly in recent years. For the whole year 2020, courts in Russia passed criminal sentences against 16.2 thousand migrants (3.06% of the total number of those convicted), in 2021 — against 19.2 thousand migrants (3.4%), in 2022 and 2023 — about 22 thousand (3.77 and 4% respectively).

From year to year, the criminal offenses for which newcomers are tried in Russia remain roughly the same. Every fourth (24.6%) is tried for document forgery, another 20% for theft, and 18% for drug-related offenses. 12% of convicted migrants received sentences for violent crimes (causing harm to health, robbery, rape, murder, etc.). This figure has remained almost unchanged over the past five years. Another 0.7% (76 people) were convicted on terrorist articles.

At the same time, the authorities continue to talk about the growth of crime on the part of newcomers, including extremist crimes and rape. If the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin, is to be believed, the number of serious crimes committed by migrants is growing by dozens of percentage points, not only among adults, but also among minors. However, IStories has already told how he manipulates these statistics.

The pressure on newcomers from the courts is growing against the backdrop of the decreasing number of migrants in the country. The Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration estimates that about 3.5 million migrants will be working in Russia in 2023 — about one million fewer than before the pandemic. As Rosstat notes, only 560,000 migrants entered Russia in 2023 — the lowest value since 2013.

At the same time, the population in Russia has been declining since 2018 — this is influenced by the decline in birth rate, high mortality of young men and the outflow of citizens abroad. According to the demographers of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, in order to maintain the population at the level of 146 million people — and at the same time the ability, for example, to pay pensions, ensure the growth of the economy and people’s incomes — Russia must attract from 390 thousand to 1.1 million migrants annually.