Guest workers will be pulled by the tongue

The bill that appeared in the State Duma database will not only not reduce crime by migrants, but will also lead to its increase

A bill on testing migrant children’s knowledge of the Russian language has appeared in the Duma’s database, which will become a condition for their admission to general education institutions.

The topic is of keen interest to both opponents of labor immigration, led by the Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin, and economists and demographers, who point out that if there is a shortage of workers, the Russian economy will simply collapse without migrant workers.

The explanatory note to the project states that the law will not require additional funding.

This is a common excuse, but here it means that no one is going to create primary Russian language courses for migrant children,

which would probably largely solve the problem occurring in schools.

Meanwhile, few people noticed that the test for knowledge of the Russian language, which the children of migrants who grew up in Russia most often speak, is far from the most threatening point of the project for them.

Tatyana Kotlyar from Obninsk, about whose criminal case we wrote in detail in May, drew our attention to another innovation of the project: in addition to knowledge of the language, the condition for admission to school from April 1 (a joke? For information: schools begin work from September 1) will be “presentation a document confirming the legality of their ( children - L.N. ) presence on the territory of the Russian Federation.”

Kotlyar masters the issue like no one else. According to investigators, during the next criminal case against her, in the apartment she inherited from her mother, Tatyana Mikhailovna registered 10.5 thousand migrants over 15 years. She continues to consult them three times a week in her public reception room and knows that children born to migrants, including those who managed to obtain Russian citizenship, often do not have documents “confirming the legality of their stay.”

The primary document confirming “legality” is a birth certificate, issued on the basis of a certificate from the maternity hospital, but within 90 days such a child must be registered somewhere, or, in the old way, registered. But most often, migrants do not own living space, and the owners of rented apartments are reluctant to register their mother and father, and even less so their child.

Now such children are admitted to schools on the basis of Article 43 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation: “Everyone has the right to education.” And moreover: “Basic general education is compulsory.” A certificate from the school retroactively becomes the basis for registration. Children not accepted into school, as implied by the bill introduced by V.V. Volodin, I.A. Yarovoy, V.A. Vasiliev, G.A. Zyuganov, L.E. Slutsky, S.M. Mironov and other deputies will legally find themselves on the territory of the Russian Federation as illegal immigrants.

An argument with a reference to the Constitution no longer means much to the Duma, but the actual consequences must also be foreseen:

such forced illegal immigrants will join the ranks of organized criminal groups, which are often formed along national and linguistic lines.

As for Tatyana Kotlyar, she will no longer be able to help them all: according to the decision of the Obninsk court, confirmed by the Kaluga Regional Court, she now has the right to register no more than six people at a time in her apartment, and no more than five in her mother’s former apartment. Where did these numbers come from? The prosecutor's office probably relied on Soviet “living space standards,” but this argument did not make it into the court decision: now there are no such standards in the law. Be that as it may, the persistent Kotlyar will not be able to overcome the “veto”, since the decision that has entered into legal force has also been received by the MFC (multifunctional centers for the provision of state and municipal services, there are two of them in Obninsk), which previously, albeit reluctantly, accepted applications from Kotlyar just as a given.

The criminal case, although the prosecutor’s office insisted on the actual imprisonment of the 74-year-old human rights activist, was resolved this time: according to the sentences that came into force (two), Kotlyar, who did not take money from migrants for “registration”, with the support of citizens who sympathized with her, was able to collect and pay 680 thousand rubles to the treasury.

Let's see what amendments will be made to the anti-migrant bill for the second reading.