After two years of toil on an Olympics-linked electrical project, 50-year-old Dai Yi has been packed off to his country home, unable to witness first-hand the fruits of his work at the Beijing Games.

Dai is one of many labourers and others who lack Beijing residence papers who say they have been ordered out as the city’s pre-Games clean-up turns towards its millions of ragtag migrants.

“The authorities will not let us stay. It’s because of the Olympics,” said the diminutive labourer, his work-roughened hands as he dragged two beat-up suitcases through a crowd at Beijing’s main train station recently.

Headed home to poverty-stricken Anhui province, Dai lost the roughly 1,000 yuan (about 145 dollars) in monthly earnings that was an important lifeline to his extended family of eight back home. “I don’t have a job now so I won’t be able to make any money until I figure out what to do,” he said.

Dai they were instructed by authorities to leave Beijing as the city entered the home stretch for the Beijing Olympics. The last-minute makeover for the city of 17 million has included a crackdown on its huge vice industry, a shutdown of work at construction sites, and measures to curb Beijing’s notoriously foul air.

The clean-up also includes the rough-hewn migrants from China’s vast countryside whose hard work in often dangerous conditions and for low pay has helped fuel Beijing’s growth and built Olympic venues.

The number of migrants in the city topped five million at the end of last year, or nearly one in three people in the capital, the city government said at the time.

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