Migrants described the disadvantages of life in Russia: attitude, food, queues at registration

“Fruits taste completely different!”

Madina and her family – her husband, two schoolchildren and parents – arrived in Moscow from Tajikistan a year and a half ago. Madina’s husband got a job as a construction worker, her father as a watchman. They rent an apartment in a residential area of ​​the capital for six. Not long ago, a woman began working as a cleaner, serving Moscow families. Before that, I worked as a salesperson in a supermarket, but cleaners earn many times more. If you try really hard and work intensively, 100,000 rubles. you’ll make plenty of money. Madina does two or three cleanings a day. At home, the woman worked in an office, she has an education. But the salary there, according to her, is small.

– What was the biggest inconvenience for you when you arrived here?

“Until we had citizenship, we had to spend a lot of money on paid doctors for our children; without citizenship, it is impossible to receive free services,” she says. – And my youngest had health problems. We recently received Russian citizenship. My dad is a Russian citizen, and because of this I was able to get it quickly.

– What don’t you like about the Muscovites you clean for?

– There are people everywhere, both good and bad. If I respect a client, I want to be respected too. For example, there are people who don’t want to pay extra for something we didn’t agree on with them. They say: “Well, is it still difficult for you to do this?!” I explain to them that I am not leaving my children to do someone else’s work for free. And some customers get impudent. I don’t quarrel with people like that, but then I just don’t go to them anymore.

– How do children feel at school?

– The eldest studies very well, even better than his classmates. And the younger one is a little worse. I asked my children, they say that they didn’t make very good friends with the kids in the class. There are normal children, and there are not so, they are divided into “ours” and “not ours”. It’s, you know, everything comes from the family. Both in the family and at school, I think so.

And, as it turned out, Madina and her family do not like the products that are sold in Moscow.

The food here is not good,” says Madina. “I don’t like to say bad things, but they don’t know how to cook very well here.” Here in our homeland the food is prepared very tasty. The products here are different. We have a garden in our homeland, and there the fruit tastes completely different. And here they are tasteless. We buy products at a chain store or at a market in our area. But it’s not the same on the market either. And so we cook our national dishes at home – pilaf, manti, we have a cauldron…

“I often came across inappropriate clients”

The capital’s taxi driver Bobur is originally from Kyrgyzstan. His wife and children remained in their homeland, and he himself has been living and working in Moscow for a year and a half. During this time, he learned the center and can drive without a navigator. He once worked for three years on a minibus in Voronezh (so he knows Russian well), and before moving to Moscow he made his living as a truck driver – he transported goods to Turkey.

He explains that he left Kyrgyzstan to work in the capital of Russia because of low salaries – “at prices like in Moscow!” I have never worked in Kyrgyzstan. In Moscow, I started driving in Economy, and then switched to Comfort Plus. Since then, he has earned 200,000 rubles per month (this includes one day off per week). He transfers money to his family every month; thanks to his earnings, they do not need anything. (Note that other taxi drivers of the same class with whom we spoke cited earnings of 130-150,000 rubles, but Bobur even sent “MK” a document about his income as proof).

At the same time, Bobur attempted to transport his wife and schoolchildren to Moscow so that the family could be reunited. But my wife doesn’t know Russian at all. The father of the family figured that it would take too much effort for his wife to master the Russian language, so it was decided that it would be more expedient for her and the children to return to their homeland. Beaubourg visits them once every six months, and is now going home after the New Year (he won’t sacrifice pre-New Year orders, of course).

“When I worked at economy, I often came across inadequate clients,” he says. “I constantly heard insults: “Why are our men in the Northern Military District, and you are not?” I explained that I was from another country, but they said: “It doesn’t matter, you make money here!” Passengers are better on “comfort plus”, no one says that. And I can immediately distinguish visitors from Muscovites, because visitors are ruder! And Muscovites are just polite.

Otherwise, Bobur likes it in Moscow. He eats in teahouses (he knows where the food is best), and he specifically chooses routes closer to them when it’s dinner time.

“I believe that if a person is not lazy and wants to work, then you can make good money in Moscow,” he said finally. – The most important thing is that a person has a desire! This year I have already started building a house in my homeland for my family.

“In the first year I fell ill with otitis media and sinusitis”

Zubeida is Tajik, but lives in Krasnoyarsk. Her father has been working in this city for a long time, and it so happened that she came to him and “put down roots.” She has a daughter and will soon have a son. The woman has a secondary medical education, and is now studying in Krasnoyarsk to become an obstetrician-gynecologist. As she says, for several years she has not been able to get used to the climate, which is sharply different from their native one: winter is 8-9 months long, a lot of snow and frosts down to -45. “In the first year I fell ill with otitis media and sinusitis,” she complained. According to her, there are no problems with food: they cook national dishes at home, and, in addition, there are many cafes of oriental cuisine in the city, so “there is no longing for food.”

“I always quickly found a common language with the people I met personally, there was no hostility,” continues Zubeida. – But as for strangers on the street, in public transport, then it’s every man for himself. Once in the summer, in the heat, I felt sick, nauseous, vomiting and lacking air, my water ran out, but everyone passed by. And only after 15 minutes one woman asked if everything was okay? This would not happen in our homeland. When I was nine months pregnant, I was once on a bus, and no one gave up their seat.

I don’t like the general attitude towards visiting women from Central Asia – recently they said on TV news that “more and more often women in Central Asia are giving birth to children in order to receive benefits.” Are you seriously? That is, they had not given birth before and after they learned about the benefit, they immediately began to give birth, do you think so? You are mistaken, our women have always given birth without these benefits, usually 2-3 times, sometimes more.

Many more Russians are indignant, saying, “I pay taxes, and these pensioners (from Central Asia) receive citizenship, and then a pension.” I would like to remind you that it was these pensioners who worked in the Soviet Union and paid taxes to the state budget, and from this budget your and our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers received pensions.

Now foreigners (migrants from different republics) pay a patent (in our region it is 7,500 rubles per month), and visitors from Central Asia who have received Russian citizenship, like us, work and pay taxes. Many people understand this and treat it normally, but some people are very angry about it. There are different people, both you and us, but there are still more good ones here. Therefore, let’s be kind to each other – it’s not for nothing that they say that there is no bad nation, but only bad people.

“The employer is not ready to pay more”

“The problems faced by migrants in the Russian Federation are changing; we can say that the most pressing one now is that they are underpaid,” an employee of Smart Migrant, which helps migrants in Moscow and the region, told us. – Historically, it has always been the case that foreigners were recruited instead of Russians because they could be paid less. But times are changing, the dollar is now not profitable for migrants at the current exchange rate, and they send money home in dollars. If previously large companies could find workers for 50,000-60,000 rubles, now there are not enough foreigners at construction sites and in production. This is a big problem. The employer is not ready to pay more.

The second problem is related to the SVO: there is a rumor that they are all being taken to a migration center in a war zone, and they believe it. And thirdly, now the attitude towards migrants on the part of law enforcement agencies has become tougher.

The main “old” problem remains – with registration. A person arrives and has 15 calendar days. There are three ways: if he goes to a specific organization to work, he is accommodated at the production site (if there are conditions: trailers, cabins), or the company has an agreement with the hostel, then he can be sure that he will be registered. The second way is to check into a hostel or hostel, where he will be helped with registration. And the third way is if he wants to rent an apartment. And owners often do not want to register foreign citizens with them – they are afraid that he will transfer the apartment to himself, but only ignorant people think so. In fact, registration is just a piece of paper for law enforcement agencies to control the place of stay of visitors.

Another difficulty is the queue at the Ministry of Internal Affairs for registration. For example, they could make coupons similar to how they are organized in the MFC and many other places, that is, an electronic queue. But, unfortunately, everything happens there the old fashioned way; the queue number is written on pieces of paper that can get lost. And, as a rule, the atmosphere in such queues is very noisy and tense.

There is also a problem – let’s be honest – that many people buy registration. Someone buys from companies that have access to the database, and they enter it there (but this is still a violation), and someone buys from scammers, and then it will not be in the database. The police will stop him, check him, and in this case he will face a fine, deportation, etc. This is being monitored more strictly now than before.”

Let us recall that at the “Results of the Year 2023”, during his direct line, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the figure: there are 10 million labor migrants in Russia. According to him, there is currently a need for labor in the Russian Federation, “but this does not mean that we here must solve economic problems at any cost and to the detriment of the indigenous population of Russia.” Putin said that “we need a special body that would look at this problem as a whole.” On December 22, 2023, the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov announced the improvement of migration policy based on the results of the direct line.