MOSCOW, Sept. 10 (Xinhua) -- About 9 million foreigners travel to Russia every year for various purposes, a senior Russian official said on Thursday.
"At any given time, between 6 million and 6.5 million people are staying here," Andrei Kikot, Russia's first deputy interior minister and head of the citizenship and foreign nationals registration service, told Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting.
Kikot specified that around 3 million of the arrivals are labor migrants, 1.7 million are their family members, and another 1 million comprise tourists, students and foreigners on private visits.
He noted that the number of labor migrants residing in Russia legally is on the rise, with the share increasing from 45 percent to 50 percent.
Kikot said that over the past 18 months, Russia's Interior Ministry has barred roughly 200,000 foreigners who violated Russian laws from entering the country. He added that around 100,000 foreign citizens were expelled from the country, including 75,000 through forced deportation.
The official noted that Russia generated 321 billion rubles (approximately 3.8 billion U.S. dollars) in revenue from all migration-related processes over the 18-month period. In his view, the share of legal labor migration will continue to grow, and revenue will increase accordingly.
