MOSCOW, Russia - Ask 30-year-old Yaroslav Kamensky to describe his country's most pressing problem and the answer's simple: illegal immigration.
"It's everywhere, it's obvious to everyone," he said, trudging through a brisk November downpour in a bleak, working-class suburb called Lyublino.
He's far from alone: Kamensky was one of thousands of nationalists who swarmed the neighborhood's wide boulevards like angry locusts on Monday to mark Russia's Day of National Unity.
Officially, the civic holiday is meant to mark the conquest over Moscow's Polish occupiers in 1612.
But thanks to events such as this officially sanctioned "Russian March," it's actually an annual reminder of the xenophobia that's increasingly pervading society, directed mainly against predominantly Muslim migrant laborers from the Caucasus and Central Asia.
As the population continues to decline while economic incentives attract ever more workers from impoverished former Soviet republics, social tensions between ethnic Russians and the millions of legal and illegal migrants have ballooned.
They erupted into view last month, when the killing of an ethnic Russian, allegedly by an Azeri national, prompted hundreds of people to riot in another Moscow suburb.
The government has done little to stem the outpouring of anger or ensure that migrant laborers, whose unskilled and low-paid labor keeps the Russian economy running, are fairly processed through the immigration system.
That's fuelled discontent with both migrants and officials.
"The government isn't doing anything about it, and some officials have even made it their corrupt little business," Kamensky said.
A recent poll by the independent Levada Center think-tank reported 27 percent of respondents as saying the influx of migrants is the country's main problem - more than poor access to healthcare, education or rising drug use.
Russia's relatively stable economic climate has attracted droves of migrants through its porous southern borders from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and other post-Soviet states.
Although the Federal Migration Service (FMS) says there are nearly 2 million legal foreigners in Russia, researchers estimate the real figure could be up to five times higher.
In Moscow and other major urban centers, they work as street-sweepers, construction workers and cigarette vendors-the kind of jobs most Russians don't want to do.
But their presence has stoked fears among some ethnic Russians who believe the undocumented migrants are swooping in on jobs, boosting the crime rate and diluting the country's national identity.
Scenes like those during the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha last month - when thousands of believers crowded the streets with their prayer rugs near Moscow's tiny handful of mosques - typically elicit resentment from ethnic Russians.
"What are they trying to do? Show their strength?" Oleg Smirnov, a 58-year-old bearded protester, asked angrily. "We're supposed to outnumber them on our own land."
