Imminent raids on possible illegal migrants promised / Article

“Perhaps someone’s imagination may have the impression that we will immediately close the city and check all persons who may look different from us, but that is not the case at all. So our main task is to collect this information, cooperate with the competent authorities and work purposefully in that direction. We have various types of information that these persons are staying, let’s say, in illegal accommodation places, possibly in the attics and basements of houses,” said the chief of the Riga Municipal Police.

Lukass also emphasized that such checks will not apply to couriers and other people who, for example, work on the streets of Riga. It is also not planned to require tourists to show documents – though quite how one would identify a general tourist rather than a tourist who has an obviously different ethnic background was a not a question that was explored.

It is not yet known in which neighbourhoods the potential illegal shelters are located and Lukass did not disclose precisely how many reports the police have received this month about such shelters, though it was estimated at about 3 to 4 reports a day, which police officers immediately check.

Riga Deputy Mayor Edvards Ratnieks (National Alliance) who has been among the proponents of such raids said that one of the goals is to find out how many illegal residents there are in Rīga. He repeatedly emphasized that these raids will not be just for a month, but are intended as a long-term measure. Ratnieks also called on Rīga residents to continue reporting to the police about places where persons residing in Latvia illegally may be staying.

Ratnieks, a deputy mayor of Rīga, believes that universities should set quotas to prevent the majority of students from being third-country nationals. Ģirts Lapiņš, a member of the same party as Ratnieks and head of the Riga City Council Security, Order and Corruption Prevention Committee, added that a letter with a proposal for such quotas has already been sent to the Ministry of Education and Science.

Latvian universities should attract citizens of European Union countries, said Lapiņš. He also referred to the development of amendments to the Immigration Law in the Saeima, which envisages incorporating the possibility for the state to prohibit legal entities from temporarily inviting third-country nationals as employees.

Riga Mayor Viesturs Kleinbergs (Progressives), in turn, pointed out that after today’s press conference on illegal immigration, he was confused by Ratnieks’s inability, as the vice mayor responsible for security and order, to specifically answer journalists about the usefulness of such measures.

“I would like to emphasize that illegal immigration is not a priority for the Riga Municipal Police and additional resources will not be directed to it. The Municipal Police, the State Security Service and the Ministry of the Interior already provide checks and take care of security in their daily routine work,” Kleinbergs pointed out.