The article is based on materials from field studies of the places of concentration of migrants in Chelyabinsk. Research tasks of the article: 1) to identify the objects of concentration of migrants, 2) to determine the basic laws of their folding and functioning, 3) to propose scenarios of their possible development for the future. The author, in a unified logic, considered three illustrative cases of concentration of migrants: the “Chinese” market, residential buildings around it, and route taxis. Comparing these objects with each other, the author assumes that the emergence and functioning of areas of concentration of migrants is determined by a special logic. The object of the analysis is the development around large markets that have emerged on the urban periphery. In the urban periphery, as a result of various demographic, social and other processes of recent decades, there has been a partial change of population. At the present stage, a significant part of it is made up of migrants. They are mostly market workers, their relatives and friends. At the same time, migrant infrastructure was developing in the “ethnic” markets and in the adjacent residential buildings. In the perception of the local population, such a location acquires the image of a migrant. However, the real scale of the presence of migrants looks more modest than local residents imagine.