Xenophobia and Schools

Following the onset of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there has been a notable escalation in anti-immigrant sentiment within Russia. A survey conducted by the Levada Center reveals that, from 2023 to 2024, dissatisfaction with immigrants became the predominant social concern among Russian citizens, surpassing all other pressing issues, such as property inequality, lack of access to education and healthcare, and other societal problems. The strongest wave of xenophobia and violence against individuals who appeared “non-Russian” occurred in the spring of 2024 following the terrorist attack in Crocus. However, the trend has been in the making for some time and appears to be less of a direct response to the attack and more of a manifestation of the prevailing sentiment of aggression and fear within Russian society in recent times. Such sentiments have manifested themselves against the backdrop of tougher immigration policies, radical statements by officials, and the increasing popularity of new far-right extremist groups. These movements encompass a spectrum of positions, ranging from those who support the government to those who criticize it for its perceived lack of decisive action, both in the context of the war in Ukraine and other issues.

It is important to note that the authorities' initiatives are now directed not only against adults but also against the most vulnerable group — children with migration experience. For example, in August 2024, a bill was introduced in the State Duma proposing that the mere fact of an immigrant’s employment in Russia should not be considered sufficient grounds for their family members to remain in the country. The proposed amendment, as suggested by the legislators, would modify the current legislation by granting residency rights to workers only, but not to their family members. Currently, spouses and children of working immigrants are permitted to enter Russia with them. However, under the new law, if passed, parents would be required to leave their children under the age of 18 in their home country. This would effectively sever family ties and significantly exacerbate the hardships experienced by children. The proposed law is currently under review, but many politicians are already using it to attract the attention of voters who share their anti-immigrant prejudices. In addition, it serves as a means to foment xenophobic sentiments. For example, Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the State Duma, and Dmitry Medvedev, former President and Deputy Chairman of the Security Council, have proposed further restrictive measures for the legal stay of foreign nationals and their families in Russia.

Xenophobic Legislative Initiatives Against Children

Today several laws are directly aimed at restricting children's right to education. On December 12, the State Duma passed a bill that introduced a mandatory Russian language test for children with foreign citizenship. On December 20, the Federation Council approved it. Children who fail the test will be banned from attending school, and there will be additional control over the “legality” of potential schoolchildren’s stay in Russia. The authors of the bill are Vyacheslav Volodin, Deputy Chair Irina Yarovaya, and leaders of factions and relevant committees. Introduced in November, the bill was passed by the State Duma almost instantaneously. It is scheduled to come into force on April 1, 2025.

In September, the State Duma witnessed the introduction of another radical bill that pertained to the provision of paid education for children of foreign nationals. One of the bill's authors, Yaroslav Nilov, who serves as the head of the State Duma's Committee on Labor, Social Policy, and Veterans Affairs, has conducted a whole media campaign to justify the need for the law. He explains its importance by citing the alleged shortage of school and kindergarten places due to children with migration experiences. The fate of this proposed legislation remains unclear. However, the public discourse surrounding such xenophobic bills and officials’ statements is adversely affecting the situation by exacerbating anti-immigrant sentiments among parents and school administrators.

As for the bill already adopted in December, it implies additional control over the “legality” of children's stay in Russia. What does this mean? The authors of the bill emphasize some universal principle of “legality.” “All countries must fight illegal migration because it is a matter of offenses,” says Volodin. However, within the context of Russian law, there are many different bureaucratic norms concerning migrants. For instance, an individual may enter the country legally and have the right to stay, yet fail to either renew their work permit and health insurance or register with the appropriate office. Alternatively, they may obtain temporary rather than permanent registration. This makes the concept of “(il)legality” very vague. Since the law does not specify what documents parents will be required to present when enrolling their children in school, it creates an additional space for extortion and discrimination against migrant families.

School Admission Rules and Practices

There are many different documents regulating school admissions in Russia. However, what matters in practice is not just the legal side of things, but how school administrations interpret the laws and what unofficial practices they apply. The issue is that prior to recent initiatives, the legal side of school enrollment was unclear. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every person has the right to free, at least primary, education. Article 62 of the Russian Constitution declares that foreign citizens are entitled to the same rights as Russian citizens unless specified otherwise by the federal law (notably, Article 43 includes primary and secondary education as part of those rights).

However, there are lower-level acts that schools rely on, which contradict international laws and federal Russian legislation. Specifically, in 2014, the Ministry of Education and Science issued Order 32, which required permanent registration for school enrollment. In 2020, the Ministry of Education issued Order 236 concerning admissions to kindergartens, which allowed educational institutions to independently regulate their admission rules.

On the basis of these legislations, school directors have illegally denied enrollment to children with migration experiences. Research into schools in St. Petersburg showed that this primarily concerned prestigious schools — gymnasiums and specialized schools offering advanced study in specific subjects. Ordinary, less popular schools often took a more lenient approach when considering documents, as they were more concerned with filling the necessary quota of students. For example, a child who only had temporary registration for three months could be enrolled and no additional documents were required. One school principal shared in 2017 during a study in St. Petersburg that the administration would overlook the situation with documents due to the lack of students to open the first grade, as the school's funding depended on the number of students. However, the situation for migrant families was gradually deteriorating, and in large cities, access to education was becoming increasingly limited, affecting virtually all schools. The requirement for permanent registration became part of an informal practice: if parents knew their rights and were willing to defend them, children were typically enrolled. Human rights activists successfully assisted migrant families with lawsuits and by informing parents of their rights. Simply mentioning specific laws almost always guaranteed school enrollment. However, many migrant parents are unaware of their rights, and only a few seek help from NGOs.

What is Changing in School Access?

Human rights defenders, embassies, and diaspora organizations note that access to schools and kindergartens for children from families with migration experience has now become especially difficult. A staff member of a human rights organization that helps migrants and refugees told the author of this text that migrant workers often come for help, telling them that school teachers or principals explicitly said that they have been instructed by higher authorities to enroll only Russian citizens. According to an anonymous human rights activist, the school admission system has generally become more bureaucratized and complicated, but it has become especially challenging for foreign nationals. “I even had a woman from Kyrgyzstan say to me that she tried to find such a law [about only admitting Russian citizens], but she couldn't find anything online. That's because such a law does not exist,” the activist noted.

According to her, “In court proceedings with education departments, the courts mostly side with children. So, it is possible to enroll children in school through the courts, but it is a long and complicated process, and not all migrants are willing to go that far. Many are afraid of legal battles and refuse to pursue it further.”

In September 2024, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kyrgyzstan reported an increase in the number of complaints from Moscow and the Moscow region regarding refusals to admit children of Kyrgyz citizens to schools. In response, the Kyrgyz Embassy contacted Russian authorities to take action. According to the Kyrgyz MFA, on September 18, 224 children with Kyrgyz citizenship were waiting to be enrolled in Moscow and the region, even though the school year had already started. Valentina Chupik, a human rights activist and director of the Tong Jahoni initiative, reported that this statistic is understated. Her organization alone received twice as many inquiries from Kyrgyz families whose children were being refused school enrollment in Moscow. According to the activist, schools are citing an “order from above not to accept anyone but Ukrainians.”

Language Adaptation

When xenophobic politicians talk about migration, they often emphasize scary stories about schools where children don’t speak Russian. They often cite unverified statistics. For example, Dmitry Medvedev claimed, “In some classrooms, three-quarters of first-graders don’t speak Russian.” However, it is difficult to say what percentage of students do not speak Russian fluently enough. The difficulties in measuring this are mostly due to methodology: who is considered to be in need of assistance in learning Russian? Often, when people talk about the number of “migrant children” in schools, they mix up three separate things.

The first approach is to simply count foreign nationals. Official surveys commissioned by the Ministry of Education showed that in 2022, 1.5% of all students in secondary schools were foreign nationals. This percentage is significantly lower than in other countries with high rates of migration. The uneven distribution of the number of children leads to schools with a higher percentage of migrant children, but nowhere near the numbers claimed by politicians. According to a report for the Ministry of Education, only 36 Russian schools have a foreign student population of 3 to 10%. Of these, the children of migrants constitute a substantial portion of the student body in only 6 schools. 

29 out of these 36 schools are located in the annexed area of Crimea, which is not internationally recognized as part of Russian territory, meaning that we are talking about citizens of Ukraine. They are obviously not migrants. However, what is even more important is that this approach does not provide any basis for understanding how many children of non-native speakers, citizens of Ukraine, especially from eastern regions, typically speak Russian. Russian citizens, especially from indigenous peoples or those who have received citizenship from post-Soviet families, might also need language adaptation.

Another approach is when all “non-Slavs” are labeled as “migrant children.” For example, prejudiced parents write in online chats that there are too many migrants in the school. They do not want to send their children there and demand the administration to limit the number of “migrant children.” They know nothing about the citizenship or language proficiency of the students, relying instead on visual perception of the school corridor or playground.

Finally, the third approach focuses on language proficiency. Children who do not speak Russian at a level sufficient for learning require teacher assistance, additional lessons, or integration programs. This may also include children with Russian citizenship from national republics. This approach primarily considers the interests of the children and their teachers, for whom it is important to organize the learning process.

These approaches may overlap: for instance, children without Russian citizenship may speak Russian fluently, while a “non-white” child may lack citizenship. However, there can be visually distinct children who speak Russian as a native language, children with foreign citizenship who are fluent in Russian, and vice versa. A staff member from a human rights organization working with migrants and refugees told the author of this article that she often encounters families who have already received Russian citizenship but whose children do not speak Russian. However, in various cases, any of these groups are labeled as “migrants,” which allows for manipulation of public opinion.

The state’s social policy, including within the framework of schools, should take into account all children: it ought to provide psychological assistance in adaptation, support visible minorities, and oppose xenophobia and bullying based on ethnic prejudice. Effective learning is not related to the color of the children’s skin or their citizenship but to their proficiency in the language the teacher uses during lessons. There are different ways to improve classroom work in terms of proficiency in the official language. The practice of testing for language proficiency when enrolling in school is useful only if it includes preparation for those who are not fluent enough. However, the new bill to ban children who do not speak Russian from school does not offer any preparatory measures.

Interestingly, when the bill was discussed, it was proposed to provide free Russian language courses; however, these amendments were rejected. Families with migration experiences generally cannot afford paid courses, just as they cannot afford paying full tuition fees for secondary education — a measure proposed in another mentioned draft bill.

The most common method of language adaptation worldwide is integration classes. Volodin's statement that “the entire global practice is based on the idea that before entering an educational institution, you must learn the language of the country you arrived in” contradicts the experience of countries with large numbers of migrants. All EU countries, for example, have free language preparation programs for children at the school level. Russia also used to implement a similar practice with free in-depth preparatory Russian language courses. For example, in Moscow, the “Russian Language Schools” program operated for almost 10 years starting in 2006. Children studied the language in a separate group for a year but attended physical education, music, and other lessons with the regular class to familiarize themselves with the school. Later, due to a lack of funding, the program was closed. In other regions, additional time during after-school hours was used to teach children the new language.

Additionally, learning productivity increases if teachers are trained to teach Russian as a foreign language. In the past, there were government programs for additional teacher education, but these have now been almost completely discontinued. Only programs created by NGOs, such as "Identically Different" [note: Odinakovo Raznie] in Vladivostok and in the Kaluga region, are still operational.

Currently, officials do not talk about funding for integration classes, additional Russian lessons for non-native speakers, or teacher training, but instead create barriers for children with migration experience when they try to enter school. This contradicts international practices for the adaptation of migrants, which show that the host society has an interest in teaching the official language, and the easiest path to language integration is through free schooling.

Consequences of Further Restrictions

What might be the consequences of further restricting access to education for children from families with migration experiences? First, this will lead to the separation of migrant families. The experience of helping organizations shows that if parents are unable to get their children into school, they send them back to their homeland. This is a traumatic situation for children. Later, as teenagers, these children may return to Russia without knowing the Russian language, and their adaptation will be much more difficult. The easiest integration for foreigners happens in preschool and elementary school, where children quickly learn the language while communicating with their peers. It would seem that in Russia, against the backdrop of a declining birth rate, migration is a resource for replenishing the population. The country needs young adults who know the language and have been socialized in Russia. The new bill goes against this logic.

Second, the number of children living in Russia but not attending school may increase. Migrant children of middle and high school age are often excluded from the secondary education system as it is. There are no reliable statistics on how many migrant children of school age do not attend school in Russia, but even 10 years ago, experts indicated that their number could reach 20-30 % of all children with migration experience. In several studies of schools in St. Petersburg (conducted in 2009-2010, 2014, and 2018), researchers regularly encountered children who had not been to school for several years. These children said that their parents couldn’t get them into school — at ages 12-14, they have already been forced to work for several years. It should be noted that among the respondents, these were only those who later managed to return to school. They often mentioned older sisters who were not attending school and were instead helping with work or taking care of younger children of preschool age. Thus, the schools’ reluctance to admit children from migrant families intersects with gender discrimination: supposedly, it is not necessary for girls to go to school. Instead of providing girls with alternative possibilities through education, schools refuse to integrate them.

In addition to humanistic considerations as education is one of the fundamental human rights, practical considerations are also important. Migration is already taking place in Russia, and research on the growing generation of children with migration experience (18-35 years old) shows that they have successfully integrated into society (they have received higher education, work, and their social circle includes people from different ethnic groups, though they tend to form romantic relationships and marriages within their own ethnic group). Children who live here are already part of society. Excluding them and creating groups deprived of education can only augment inequality and lead to radicalization. Ghettos — whether spatial or symbolic — only lead to hatred and division in society.

Inequality harms not only those who are discriminated against but society as a whole. The short-term benefits of saving money on teacher training and integration classes may lead to serious long-term problems. No one benefits from a xenophobic policy towards children. The ability to understand the Other and live in a multilingual and multicultural world is an important socialization skill that now the majority of children will not be able to learn in school.

The future must be built on shared values, which are easiest to pass on to children in particular. Therefore, social policy should aim to maximize the inclusion of children from migrant families in schools, providing them with wide and accessible language programs.

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