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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tajikistan, this paper examines how migration bureaucracy represents labor migrants to Russia. It analyzes how officials frame migrants’ “problems” and “risks,” producing a coherent figure shaped by colonial and racialized assumptions.

Paper long abstract

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, labor migration from Central Asia (particularly Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan) to Russia has become a widespread and enduring livelihood strategy, enabled by visa-free mobility within the post-Soviet space. Over the past three decades, this mobility has become deeply embedded in local economies and accompanied by the expansion of migration bureaucracies, shaped both by state institutions and international agencies seeking to regulate and “order” migration. Central to this bureaucratic labor is the production of the migrant as a governable subject.

Bureaucracy is not only a site of regulation and conflict but also of conceptual labor, where epistemic coherence about migrants and their “problems” is produced and maintained. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with migration bureaucracy in Tajikistan, this paper examines the politics of representation through which migrants are institutionally understood. It asks how widely accepted assumptions about migrants’ needs, risks, and vulnerabilities come to be framed as objective truths within official discourse.

Through analysis of officials’ speeches, documents, and everyday interactions, the paper explores how a diverse and fragmented bureaucratic landscape nonetheless produces a coherent and unitary figure of the migrant. Attending to colonial and racializing legacies embedded in migration governance. It shows how labor conditions in Russia, combined with ascribed ethnicity, contribute to representations of Tajik migrants as inherently unprepared. By foregrounding bureaucratic practices of representation, the paper highlights how migration governance shapes not only policy outcomes but also dominant ways of knowing migrant subjects.