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23 August 2025

Russia’s Migrant Crackdown Deepens After Concert Hall Attack

Central Asian immigrants face rising hostility, new restrictions, and violence in Russia as authorities tighten controls despite a growing labor shortage.

In the bustling heart of Moscow, an immigrant worker from Uzbekistan recently found himself turned away at a bank, the teller refusing to serve him without a word of explanation. For countless immigrants from Central Asia, this kind of everyday hostility has become all too familiar, woven into the fabric of their lives in Russia. Sometimes, though, the animosity erupts into something far more dangerous—outright violence.

“Mostly you notice it when you go to the hospital, a clinic, a government office: You stand in line and everyone shoots you dirty looks,” the Uzbek man told The Associated Press, requesting anonymity out of fear. His experience is echoed by many others who have come to Russia seeking better opportunities, only to find themselves at the receiving end of suspicion and aggression.

All this is happening at a time when Russia faces a paradox: a severe labor shortage, largely the result of its ongoing war in Ukraine. According to the Central Bank, more than 20% of Russian businesses reported in the first quarter of 2025 that a lack of workers was hindering their operations. One would think this would make the country more welcoming to foreign laborers. Instead, Russian authorities have chosen a very different path—one that’s growing more restrictive and hostile by the day.

Rather than opening doors, officials are tightening restrictions, tracking immigrants’ movements, clamping down on their employment, and even making it harder for their children to go to school. The government claims there are 6.1 million immigrants in Russia, but most experts believe the real number is even higher.

This crackdown has coincided with a chilling event: the trial of four Tajik nationals accused of a deadly shooting and arson attack at a Moscow concert hall in March 2024. The attack killed 149 people and was claimed by an Islamic State group, yet Russian authorities were quick to blame Ukraine for the tragedy. When the accused appeared in court, they showed clear signs of having been severely beaten.

After the massacre, anti-migrant rhetoric reached fever pitch. Parliament speaker Vyacheslav Volodin captured the mood when he declared, “Migration control is extremely important” to ensure that foreign nationals engaged in illegal activity could be deported without a court order. In the eight days following the attack, lawyer Valentina Chupik—who has spent more than two decades working with the immigrant community—reported receiving 700 accounts of injuries to immigrants, including “faces smashed against the doors of police stations.”

Human rights groups have sounded the alarm. According to Human Rights Watch, “Central Asian migrants seeking work in Russia due to dire economic conditions in their countries of origin today face ethnic profiling, arbitrary arrests, and other harassment by police in Russia.” Syinat Sultanalieva, author of a recent report, stated, “The heinous massacre cannot justify massive rights abuses against Central Asian migrants in Russia.”

While the initial wave of violence may have subsided, it has hardly disappeared. In April, police conducted a dramatic raid on a Kyrgyz-run bathhouse in Moscow, with video footage showing masked officers forcing half-naked bathers to crawl across the floor and stepping on them before covering a security camera. Similar raids have taken place at warehouses, construction sites, and mosques. Immigrants swept up in these operations are sometimes coerced into joining the Russian military to fight in Ukraine, often with the threat of losing their residency documents or facing deportation. For some, especially recently naturalized citizens who failed to register for military service, enlisting is presented as the only alternative to prison or expulsion. Others are offered a fast track to Russian citizenship if they agree to serve.

Alexander Bastrykin, head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, highlighted in May that “20,000 ‘young’ citizens of Russia, who for some reason do not like living in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan (and) Kyrgyzstan” were now serving in Ukraine. This statement, while perhaps intended as a point of pride, underscores just how entangled the fate of Central Asian migrants has become with Russia’s military and political ambitions.

Even those who avoid direct violence aren’t spared from the tightening web of anti-migrant legislation. In 2024, 13 Russian regions banned immigrants from certain jobs—including roles in hospitality, catering, finance, and even as taxi drivers. Starting in September 2025, a pilot program in the Moscow region will require migrants entering without a visa to be tracked via a mobile app. Failure to comply lands them on a police watchlist, potentially cutting off access to banking, cellphones, and the internet.

Children of immigrants face their own barriers. A nationwide law now bans them from attending school unless they can prove proficiency in Russian. Less than six weeks after the law took effect, officials admitted that only 19% of applicants were able to take the required language test, with most rejections due to incomplete or inaccurate paperwork.

For many, the bureaucratic maze is overwhelming. Another Uzbek man, who has lived and worked in St. Petersburg for nearly twenty years, described waiting over seven hours just to get his residency documents. “It’s hard to get paperwork,” he told The Associated Press. “There just isn’t the time.”

These mounting obstacles often force immigrants into the shadows, relying on bribes to survive. Lawyer Valentina Chupik argues that Russia’s system “results in violations that cannot be avoided.” She explained, “This is exactly what this mass regulation is striving for: not for all migrants to be here legally, but for everyone to be illegal. That way, they can extract bribes from anyone at any moment and deport anyone who resists.”

Authorities, far from tamping down on anti-migrant feeling, seem intent on stoking it. Alexander Bastrykin has claimed that immigrants “physically occupy our territory, not just with their ideology but with specific buildings”—a clear reference to mosques. Ultra-nationalist lawmaker Leonid Slutsky has accused foreign workers of “behaving aggressively, causing conflicts and potentially dangerous situations.”

Experts say this scapegoating is hardly unique to Russia. Caress Schenk, a political scientist at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, noted, “Closing borders, conducting migrant raids and tightening policies are all tools that are easy go-tos for politicians the world over. It goes in cycles that are sensitive to geopolitical pressures, as we’re seeing now, but also things like election campaigns and domestic political rivalries.”

The surge of “anti-migrant propaganda” is unmistakable, according to the Uzbek immigrant who was rebuffed at the Moscow bank. “If every person paying attention to the TV, the radio, the internet is only told that migrants are ‘bad, bad, bad,’ if they only show bad places and bad people, of course, that’s what people are going to think,” he said.

This rhetoric has become a key part of the nationalist narrative used by President Vladimir Putin and others to justify the 2022 invasion of Ukraine—casting Russia as a fortress besieged by external enemies. “Russia has started lumping together all of ‘the external enemies’ that it’s created over the years for itself: the migrants, the Ukrainians, the West,” said Tajik journalist Sher Khashimov, who covers migration and social issues. “It all becomes this part of this single narrative of Russia being this castle under siege, and Putin being the only person who is on the lookout for ordinary Russians.”

The Uzbek immigrant in Moscow summed up the situation with weary resignation: Russia has created conditions “supposedly to help people, to help migrants. But the rules do not work. Special barriers are created that migrants cannot pass through on their own.”

As anti-migrant sentiment continues to rise, the gap between Russia’s economic needs and its political rhetoric widens, leaving millions of immigrants caught in a system that seems intent on keeping them both essential and unwelcome.