Coming Population Census To Specify Scale Of Illegal Immigration To Russia

The All-Russian population census scheduled for October 2002 will allow in addition to specify the data on the illegal immigration to Russia, spokeswoman for the Russian State Statistics Committee Irina Zbarskaya told a news conference in Moscow. According to experts' estimations, there are several millions of illegal immigrants in Russia. The spokeswoman refused to confirm or to deny this information. According to her, the collection of data on the illegal immigrants is one of the important tasks of the coming census. In this respect special attention will be focused on the largest Russian megapolises - Moscow and St. Petersburg with the greatest number of illegal immigrants.