Tajikistan Follows Uzbekistan in Arranging to Send Migrant Workers to South Korea

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 12 – Tajikistan has now followed Uzbekistan in arranging to send migrant workers to South Korea instead of the Russian Federation, a shift that may have even greater importance to geopolitics in the longer term than the arrival of North Korean troops in the Russian Federation to fight in Putin’s war in Ukraine.
    At the end of last month, Dushanbe and Seoul signed an agreement opening the way for Tajiks to go to South Korea to work and study beginning in 2025 (ritmeurasia.ru/news--2024-11-12--tadzhikistan-stremitsja-perenapravit-trudovyh-migrantov-v-vostochnuju-aziju-76774). Such a flow help compensate for the return of Tajiks from Russia.
    This decision follows several years of discussions between the two national governments, with each having compelling interests: Dushanbe because it needs the payments from migrant workers that have fallen given Russian hostility to such people and Seoul because its population is now set to decline with deaths now exceeding births.
    Both sides are working to develop programs to provide Korean-language training to Tajiks interested in working in South Korea, people who hope to earn as much as 2500 US dollars a month. In this, Tajikistan is following Uzbekistan which already has a similar and larger program for its 100,000 migrants in South Korea (gazeta.uz/ru/2024/02/05/south-korea/).
    If this Tajik program takes off, that could lead to even larger departures of Tajik migrant workers from Russia who will now have somewhere to go where they can earn as much or even more than they did in the Russian Federation. And if other Central Asian countries follow Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Moscow will face mounting labor shortages in key sectors.