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.