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Bozorgul, a 37-year-old mother, was working at a Moscow market when the police came to arrest her. Two weeks later, she still sits on a bunk bed in a cell awaiting deportation to her native Tajikistan.
"I have three children here who are going to school in Moscow," said Bozorgul, one of 42 women at the only detention centre for female illegal immigrants in the Russian capital.
"I came here to work, there's no work where we are," she said, referring to her job as a waitress in a cafe at Cherkizovsky market, a hugh market in northeast Moscow that is a magnet for immigrants seeking work.
Moscow has been struggling with how to deal with the millions of foreign workers who flood into the country, drawn by low-paying jobs in Russia's economic boom.
Official estimates say about 10 million illegal immigrants are living in Russia, 80 percent of them from ex-Soviet states such as Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Georgia and Tajikistan.
Bozorgul was jailed because she "broke Russian residency laws," Vladimir Lukin, President Vladimir Putin's human rights representative, told her on a visit to her detention center.
Dmitry Mesnikov, a senior Moscow police official, said she would get no special treatment because of her three children.
"If the court orders her deportation, she will be deported. It's the law," he said.
That argument is disputed by Civil Assistance, a non-governmental organisation that provides legal assistance to migrant workers.
"We have cases of mothers deported without their children... Deportation is carried out without distinction," said Svetlana Gannushkina, head of Civil Assistance.
Immigrants from most former Soviet states do not need visas to enter Russia but must register at their place of residency within three days of arrival -- a complex bureaucratic procedure.
Obtaining a work permit presents more problems. Legislation is strict and it can take five to eight months for a foreigner to obtain working papers.
Many of the thousands of illegal workers who come to Russia every year, often only for seasonal employment, manage to slip through the cracks by bribing police officers during identity checks, Gannushkina said.
But resentment against them is high, and fanned in recent years by nationalist groups who accuse them of taking jobs from Russians and being involved in organised crime and drug trafficking.
One study showed racist killings almost doubled between 2003 and 2004.
"All this is made possible by widespread xenophobia," said Gannushkina, stating that grassroots movements of the sort seen in western Europe in support of illegal immigrants were unthinkable here.
She cited France, where the government this month pledged to give residency rights to some 6,000 illegals, notably those with children in school, thanks to a campaign backed by left-wing politicians, parents and schoolteachers.
In the first seven months of this year, 1,375 illegal immigrants were deported from Russia, according to official figures. This figure accounts for almost all of the 1,471 people who were held in detention centres in 2006.
Civil Assistance says people can languish for up to "one or two years" in poorly maintained centres, with no strictly defined limit for the length of their detention.
Bozorgul shares her small cell with five other women, a Chinese national, two Ukrainians and an Uzbek. They are allowed out only for 20 minutes to walk in the yard and to eat meals in the canteen.
No one knows the name of the Chinese girl who was brought in a few days ago. Like around 70 percent of foreigners held in detention centres she does not have her passport, which extends the deportation procedure.
"Police! Money!" the Chinese girl yelled at Lukin in Russian, a complaint understood as meaning she paid bribes to police to avoid detention.
The government has also criticised illegal workers for not paying taxes and for sending large sums of money to their home countries.
In March, Konstantin Romodanovsky, head of the federal migration service cited by the Ria-Novosti agency, said illegal immigrants caused damages to Russia of more than seven billion dollars (5.8 billion euros).
The ironic backdrop to this issue is a World Bank warning that Russia is grappling with an acute demographic crisis and needs to encourage more immigration to attract skilled foreign workers in order to sustain economic growth.
In a study, the Bank said the drop in working age population would be "especially severe after 2007" and "the need for immigration to sustain growth is very strong."
"Instead, the regulatory framework in recent years has become increasingly restrictive towards immigrants," the study said.
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Russia-immigration-jobs-rights
AFP 121231 GMT 08 06
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