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Abstract

This paper examines how Kazakhstani labour migrants navigate heterogeneous legal and political environments in Western and non-Western migration destinations. Drawing on twenty-three qualitative interviews with Kazakh migrants working in the United Kingdom, United States, Turkey and South Korea, I show that migrants’ lived experiences of legality transcend formal regime classifications. Regardless of whether they encounter democratic, transparent, rule-of-law institutions or hybrid/non-democratic, informalised governance systems, migrants rely on a combination of formal rules and socially embedded informal practices to sustain mobility, access employment and avoid legal vulnerability. I conceptualise these adaptive repertoires as micro-legalities: emergent, small-scale, socially distributed normative orders migrants construct and mobilise to interpret, supplement or navigate formal law. The paper situates these practices within the broader political economy of Kazakhstan’s migration system, shaped by long-standing mobility traditions, contemporary labour-market drivers, state regulation, fraudulent recruitment schemes and diasporic infrastructures. We argue that micro-legalities constitute an essential yet overlooked dimension of migration governance, revealing how migrants themselves co-produce functioning legal orders within opaque regulatory landscapes across political regime types.