Paper long abstract:

This papers aims at presenting two Central Asian migrant communities in Portugal. The first one are the Kazakhstanis of the Upper Douro Valley, in the north: in this area, famous for the Port Wine production but facing the challenge of rural depopulation, migrant communities become the main source of labor for the vineyards and the apple orchards. The second community are the Uzbekistanis of the region of Leiria, north of Lisbon - whose small businesses are part of a russian-speaking local building industry. Based on extensive fieldwork and in-deep interviews of pioneers of both groups, this paper tries to retrace their life stories as migrants and as communities, from the initial decision to leave their home countries, in the late 1990s or beginning of the 2000s, to the twists and turns of the migration and the integration processes. As a Conclusion, I will compare the presence of Central Asian migrants in several Western European countries and discuss the perspectives of this migration trend.