MOSCOW, October 5 (RIA Novosti) – Over 100 illegal migrants have been detained in Moscow, Russia’s Federal Migration Service reported.
The migrants, from Central Asia and Ukraine, worked as street sweepers and drivers but had no required documents. They were detained Friday at a logistics center in the Russian capital’s north, and will be deported, the service told RIA Novosti.
Earlier in the week, Migration Service officials detained 20 illegal migrant workers at a construction site in northeast Moscow and 13 more at a market in the city’s south.
Police have conducted a series of sweeps and mass checks of markets and other locations with large concentrations of immigrant workers in recent months, after a policeman was injured by a mob at a Moscow market while trying to detain a man suspected of rape at the end of July.
Economic growth driven by revenues from oil exports and a dwindling domestic labor force have attracted millions of labor migrants, many of them the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Some 11.3 million foreigners entered Russia this year, of whom 3 million work illegally, the Federal Migration Service said in late July.
