Rigged game

Before school starts again, a new wave of anti-migrant xenophobia in Russia has arisen to demand that schools tighten the enrollment process for migrant children to attend school and a cross-party bill has emerged proposing to make migrant children pay for tuition.

The authors of the bill cite data from Russia’s Interior Ministry, which says that there are more than 638,000 underage migrants in Russia, most of whom are from Central Asia. Of these, only a third attend school, which directly contradicts the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by Russia, and Article 43 of the Russian Constitution, which establishes compulsory access to free secondary education for all children.

Even fewer migrant children will attend school in the autumn compared to the previous school year as Vladimir Putin has signed amendments introducing mandatory Russian language proficiency testing for the children of foreign citizens.

Legislative discrimination

Migrant children have traditionally found it difficult to enroll in school in Russia, with many not accepted because of racism, Olga Abramenko, who works at the Memorial Anti-Discrimination Centre, says, noting that human rights defenders have often had to accompany parents to school and engage with regulatory authorities to ensure that a child could attend.

Mandatory Russian language proficiency tests began appearing in schools in March with test samples available online. To enroll in the first grade, you must pass an oral assignment but to enroll in a higher grade, you must also pass a written test. The appearance of language tests sparked a discussion online with many noting that the questions are quite complex and require comprehensive understanding of grammar.

Although State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, who was among the lawmakers who backed the measure, initially said that the tests were designed so that a score of 30% was enough for pupils to enroll in school, he later noted that the passing grade was 90% or higher. In May, Volodin also said that within the first month of migrant children taking language proficiency tests, only 27 out of 1,762 were enrolled into school — appearing to present these figures as a positive result.

In online discussions, mothers of migrant children have described the testing process as unfair. According to some accounts, even children raised in Russian-speaking households have received failing grades for making as few as two errors.

Abramenko notes that unlike the rest of the world, where language tests are often done “to outline their education path”, Russia has implemented the language tests to isolate “children who are deemed unworthy of education”.

From difficult to impossible

Human rights activists who spoke to Novaya Gazeta Europe estimate that very few migrant children will be able to attend school on 1 September, when the new school year starts.

One human rights activist revealed that the changes in the admission process had also played a role in decreasing the amount of migrant children in school. Whereas previously, parents could discuss enrollment directly with the school and explain that documents were being processed, nowadays applications are submitted online and will be rejected automatically if the correct documentation is not supplied.

The activist, who asked not to be named for security reasons, reported one case in which a family from Afghanistan, who have Russian citizenship, had not been able to enroll their children for six months because of a supposed “lack of available places”. While it was “difficult to get a migrant child enrolled into school last year, this year it is almost impossible”, the activist said, with one family considering sending their teenage sons to Tajikistan to stay with family because they know they will not be enrolled.

Some emigrate to Russia not because of work opportunities, but because of a need to escape domestic violence. The human rights activist said that she knew two mothers who had fled Tajikistan from their abusive husbands and had children who they were struggling to enroll, and who now were spending all of their time at home “scrolling TikTok from morning to night”.

Temur Umarov, a researcher at the Carnegie Berlin Centre, says that so far only the Kyrgyz authorities have responded to the new barriers to education as the country’s Foreign Ministry has proposed testing migrants’ knowledge of Russian before they emigrate.

As of yet, no other government has officially responded to Russia’s new discriminatory regulations, but there has been public outrage. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, fewer people have been migrating to Russia and these new regulations mean that migrants are now more likely to move to Russia without their families for seasonal work, Umarov added.

Because there are only a handful of language courses that cater to migrant children, human rights activists are working to open new courses.

Meanwhile, those who wish to reside in Russia permanently are at risk of further isolation, as human rights activists point out that only a small handful of migrants are ready to fight for their rights or to talk to people from beyond their own circles to ask for help.