Abstract:

Following more than two decades of cyclical labor migration to Russia, the war in Ukraine has become a pivotal event for migrant workers from Tajikistan. While the vast majority of them continues to find employment in Russia, despite the heightened risks and diminishing returns, the wider dislocations of the war in Europe have also brought new opportunities for work farther afield to Tajikistan’s mobile subjects. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in county’s south in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, my paper examines the veritable frenzy that has taken hold in Tajikistan’s migrant-sending communities following the country’s inclusion in the United Kingdom’s Seasonal Worker scheme, a visa program for migrant farm workers.

Through participant observation that saw me embedded in state-run migration centers that facilitate finding work in such new destinations, observing paperwork processing and attending recruitment events as well as trainings for aspiring overseas workers, my paper investigates how migrant workers make sense of this new “politics of destination” (Chu 2010) by drawing on a repertoire of legal knowledge and documentary strategies shaped by their experiences of working in Russia’s informal economy.

By carrying the promise of opening up new routes that would take Tajik migrant workers to “Europe”, the prospect of working on British farms also prompted extended reflections on experiences of discrimination, illegalization and racialization in Russia. Drawing on interviews and extended participant observation with migrant workers throughout the application process and following their eventual return from Great Britain, the paper provides an account of the moral economy of labor migration by discussing the ways in which my interlocutors navigate the moral conundrums of undocumented labor and having to rely on intermediaries for their mobility, and how accounts and experiences of being a migrant worker elsewhere provide an idiom for critiquing exploitation in Russia.

Abstract:

Day labourers gathering at informal hiring sites can be found in almost all countries. They are unemployed, usually men, who gather on sidewalks, parking lots or other public spaces, waiting to be hired for casual jobs and receive a daily pay. In Central Asia, informal hiring sites known as mardikor bazaar (“day labourer bazaars”) or stikhiinaya birzha (“spontaneous labour exchange”) appeared already in the late Soviet period as a result of decollectivization (Galdini, 2021). In this paper, we look at how precarious daily jobs are linked to the gendered dimension and social reproduction of migrant labour (Kangas et al., 2022) through the experiences of women working at the agricultural birzha in Kyrgyzstan. Our aim is to explore how precarious workers, in particular women in migrant families, navigate informal spaces of precarious and casual labour. The birzha is inscribed in a wider work-life experience of precarity that reveals the multi-local lives of migrant families, who adopt informal strategies to navigate multiple spaces, sources of income, and household arrangements (Thieme, 2009). Adopting the lenses of precarious life allows us to go past the usual labour market and employment focus in the literature on precarity, and to blur the divide between formality and informality as it is often conceptualised from a state-centered perspective.

Abstract:

How are market-oriented reforms transforming everyday labour in rural Uzbekistan? Following 25 years of political isolationism and state-led capital accumulation, in 2016, Uzbekistan opened its economy to global markets by attracting foreign investment through policies such as deregulation, private-public partnerships, special economic zones and intensification of relations with international financial institutions. Over the recent years this significantly transformed Uzbekistan’s agricultural landscape. The formerly state-controlled cotton and wheat farms have been replaced by a mosaic of foreign and local agricultural clusters, private commercial farms and intensive horticulture gardens. Consequently, agricultural labour relations are increasingly dictated by private interests with mixed results. While state-sanctioned forced child labour in cotton has been eliminated in 2021, neoliberal policies are introducing a new set of challenges and opportunities to everyday lives of smallholder producers who supply the bulk of informal seasonal work on large farms. Drawing on twenty semi-structured interviews with smallholders, a female seasonal labourer and two owners of intensive gardens in the Samarkand region, this chapter applies theoretical perspectives from social reproduction and political ecologies of land grabbing to examine a) how intensive gardens transform the labour regimes previously dominated by cotton; and b) the gendered implications of land and water enclosures on social reproduction of the household. The aim is to give voice to those who are navigating these changes and contribute to a growing body of literature on the ambiguous results of state-led privatisation in post-Soviet contexts.

Abstract:

While migration from Kyrgyzstan remains overall stable, an increasing number of young Kyrgyz are starting to prioritize new destinations instead of Russia. This trend, that can be observed also in other Central Asian countries, amounts to an increasing trend of diversification of destinations, fostering new outmigration to Asian countries and, more recently, Europe. While in the case of Russia mobility from Central Asia was often enabled by migration networks, in the case of mobility to non-CIS countries migration networks are gradually being replaced by public and private employment agencies.

This paper looks at the role of migration intermediaries in shaping new infrastructures of migration (Lindquist 2012). While the forms of organizing labor migration are changing when compared to already existing infrastructures that lead to Russia, I ask whether new outmigration to different destinations presents the characteristics of a new specific model of work for brokers, or whether Kyrgyzstan is adopting models already in place in other contexts, as the example of Southeast Asia. This article, based on a quantitative survey of 421 migrants and 9 in-depth interviews, considers the role of formal and informal brokers in this new migration regime in the context of the approaches of the Kyrgyz government to their regulation. As the process of structuring new migration infrastructures is shaped by the political, social, and economic context of the country, I look at the interplay between formal and informal actors in shaping new infrastructures of migration.

I find that the characteristics of migration infrastructures in Russia allow migrants to embark in mobility and start working without any knowledge at all about migration and registration rules. On the contrary, in the case of mobility to other destinations, this knowledge is delegated to brokers. While there are also brokers who send migrants to Russia and Kazakhstan, they are usually local, more informal and are usually perceived like unscrupulous agents compared to brokers in Europe. In noting that migrants’ experiences of migration to Russia differs from that of migration to non-CIS countries, this paper contributes to the emerging literature about diversification of migration destinations from Central Asia.