Short Abstract:

This book contributes new insights on migrant agency, undocumentedness and informality in non-democratic migration regimes. It is a critical reflection on contemporary migration scholarship, which focuses on the context of liberal democracies in North America and Western Europe.

Long Abstract:

This book takes up the case study of Central Asian migrants in Russia and Turkey—two archetypal non-Western, nondemocratic regimes and key migration hotspots worldwide—and investigates how migration governance outcomes are shaped by the informal processes in physical and digital landscapes in which migrant workers, employers, middlemen, landlords, street world actors and street-level bureaucrats negotiate the contemporary migration system. The book compares the migration outputs (immigration laws and policies) of Russia and Turkey, analyzing these two migration regimes through the investigation of migration outcomes on the ground — reading, seeing and understanding them through the daily experiences of migrants and other actors involved in multiple migration arenas. This bottom-up approach stems from the authors’ theoretical premise that there is no single, uncontested universal normative order within any society, but rather the outcomes of laws, regulations and policies are determined by the struggles, alliances and interplay between various social forces which take place in different social arenas. In these social arenas, rules are not clear cut and power relations remain unequal, although each actor has some degree of agency and may exert influence over the final outcome. Based on this understanding, the authors compare Russian and Turkish migration regimes by exploring power struggles, alliances and interactions in varying migration arenas where street-level bureaucrats, employers, intermediaries, landlords and migrant workers among others interact with one another. This lively ethnography presents new empirical material, a comparative perspective and methodological tools for studying migrants’ experiences and migration governance processes in non-Western migration regimes.