“The situation of the migratory phenomenon also concerns a vast country like Russia, which has registered an accentuation of the internal movements of population in recent years”, says Father Michael Ryan, from Ireland, parish priest of the parish of “Our Lady of Hope” in Moscow and president of Caritas in the Russian capital. “It’s very difficult to quantify internal migratory flows – he explains – because no official data exist. But one does have the distinct impression that the situation is continuously changing, even in the city of Moscow where there seems to be between two and five million people without proper documentation”. Large influxes of immigrants are arriving from the Caucasus, from Central Asia, from Kazakhstan, but even from former Soviet bloc countries like East Germany or Poland. In these latter cases the immigrants are often the children or grandchildren of former deportees in the time of the Soviet regime”. Faced by so composite a reality, “the task of a small service structure like Caritas in Moscow – adds Fr. Michael – is that of being close to the people who turn to us for help, encouraging most to return home, thus emerging from illegality and from the essentially precarious work in the ‘black’ economy”.
