Invisible to the crowds flocking to World Cup venues all over Russia are legions of migrant workers from Central Asia, who built the stadiums and keep them running, staff concession stands, and clean up after fans who revel through city streets.
"Migrants made up the main workforce" in the construction of stadiums and transport infrastructure for the tournament, Valery Solovei, a professor at Moscow's MGIMO foreign policy institute and an expert on immigration and nationalism, told the Associated Press. "Without migrant workers, Russia couldn't have built all these things so quickly."
Building Workers International says 21 people died on World Cup construction sites.