It is irrelevant if you lived in New York while Putin was in power. The question is how can you possible know the ethnicity of every Russian speaker or when they immigrated or even if they immigrated at all.
As usually every time you debate someone you always know 'that person', you always, 'talked to that guy' you always 'been their'. Did you speak to every Russia you "saw" and ask where they were from? Unlikely. A senses usually does not ask what city someone is from but rather their country of origin. It's no surprise that there is a large Russian population in New York or Russian speaking population but your comments are baseless are stereotypical, is every Asian person in New York Chinese? Of course not, did every Chinese speaking immigrant come from China? Is every Chinese speaker an immigrant?
It is very difficult to distinguish between a Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian, unless you are a Russian speaker and even Russian speakers sometimes can not tell the difference. Serbs, Poles, Bulgarians, Bosnians, Armenians and even Romanians are often times confused for Russians because many can speak Russian and all all besides Armenians and Romanians speak a slavic language. Moreover, the older generations also dress similar to Russians, with the famous head scarf.
In any case, i don't care too much about the subject to argue over it. Have a good weekend.
I am simply wondering are you going to argue with simply anything?
I speak Russian, as a US Army intelligence officer, they taught us how to distinguish between Russian and other ethnicity, i can only tell you this, there is a way you can tell if someone is coming from Russia, or someone who simply lived in Russia for a long time, if you are ethnic Russian, you will know how. That is the same way to tell any native from immigrant, I am an ethnic Chinese, I can tell who is from China and who is simply an asian looking man who lived in China for a long time. There is a way you can tell by the way they talked, dressed and the way they do stuff.
And I do know some DHS and INS agent, there are no way I can definitely proof that beside ask them to send you their badge, which I am not going to do, so believe it or not is up to you. But my point is, they need to supply information before they migrate to America, information such as Birth Certificate, Passport, Driving licenseand wuch to proof their ID, and we have to verify it too, its not like you can trick the INS and say you were born in Russia and in fact you , or your parent were born somewhere else. We dont let in people we dont know where they were from, it is that simple.
Couple to the fact that those information are publicly available as census statistic which publish every 3, 5 and 10 years, you dont need to believe what I said, truth is simply a few clicks away.
About whether or not Putin push those people out, I talked to the Russian in my Apartment building, and that is what i got from them, most of them a rich middle class Russian lived in Mscow and St Petersburg, they feared that putin would prosecute them with their wealth, again, feel free not to believe me, I can send you my address and you can ask them yourselve.
LOL i sont really know why you want to argue the FACT that there are many (thousand, at least) Russian left Russia and coming to US every year, according and kn 2012/2013, the number of Natraulisation of Foreign Citizens published by USCIS, Russian ztands as 4th for 39,000 naturalised to US citizenship, thats behind China, India and Mexico, again truth is simply a few clicks away, cant help you if you are too lazy to click, althought I have to say, the US is clamping down on ex soviet bloc immigration, so we will see the number drop to below 1% (90000 people) from fromer soviet bloc.
