DUSHANBE, August 9, 2013, Asia-Plus -- Russia''s Federal Migration Service has called for toughening the laws regulating the country''s estimated 10 million migrants, many of whom are believed to be in Russia illegally, Radio Liberty reports.

Deportation proceedings have already begun for hundreds of migrants, a move that is likely to be welcomed by native Russians.

Recent polls by the country''s VTsIOM research center reportedly indicate that three-fourths of Russians take a dim view of foreign workers, particularly darker-skinned non-Slavs.

But the current wave of "zachistki" -- or cleanup operations, as the market sweeps have been termed -- has sent panic through the Central Asian migrant community and families back home, many of whom are fully dependent on remittances from Russia for their survival.

Sofiya Faizulloyeva, a Tajik mother of two, told RFE/RL on August 8 that her husband has been held in Moscow''s Golyanovo tent camp for nearly two weeks, since a police raid on the Moscow market where he worked as a seasonal laborer.

“We had to send him to work in Russia, because we live in a rented flat and we need money.  We have two children who are always sick,” Faizulloyeva says.  “They detained him and promised to release him after 10 days. Today''s the 11th day, but he''s still in jail.  I''ve begged him to come back and just find a job here in Tajikistan, but he says he can''t because he''s in prison.”

Police have said all the Golyanovo detainees -- the majority of whom are Vietnamese -- are destined for deportation.

A woman held in the camp told RFE/RL the detainees were suffering from extreme fluctuations in temperature and had been given very little food.

The recent raids were spurred by an incident in which two Daghestani market vendors severely beat a Moscow policeman.  But activists say the zachistki are unfairly punishing any migrants, many of whom are regularly forced to pay hefty bribes to police in order to avoid arrest.

Many detainees say police are continuing to ask for money in exchange for food and simple necessities.

One Uzbek migrant told RFE/RL that the Sherbinka detainees were being asked to pay up to 15,000 rubles ($450) for bread and water.

Mahmoud Karimov, a Tajik migrant who was briefly detained in late July in Mytishchi, a city just outside Moscow, says he was forced to pay $150 to secure his release.  Back at the market, he speculates, the police are certain to ask for steeper and steeper bribes from the intimidated migrants that remain.

“The police told us, ''That''s how you need to be dealt with -- we need to show you that we''re still here,” Karimov says.  “We had been paying them 1,000, 1,500, 2,500 rubles before.  Now they''re asking 5,000.”

Russia has taken a somewhat schizophrenic approach to the issue of labor migration -- courting Russian-speaking Central Asians as potential new citizens on the one hand, and on the other, publishing "migrant handbooks" depicting Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Kyrgyz as paintbrushes, brooms, and other tools of manual labor.

Migration authorities, however, argue that Russia is using the sweeps to rescue many migrants from squalor and abuse from slave-labor rings run by Central Asians themselves.  Such claims were made slightly more awkward for authorities this week when the Russian Interior Ministry on August 7 admitted that two high-ranking police officers and a Federal Migration Service employee had been implicated in a criminal slave-trafficking scheme.