Paul Goble
Staunton, Nov. 28 – Most Russian discussions about migrant workers and their families in the Russian Federation treat them almost as an undifferentiated whole, Kirill Kotkov says; but in fact, they are deeply split along national lines, do not like one another, and “to speak crudely, they are dividing Russia up into spheres of influence.
The head of the St. Petersburg Center for the Study of the Countries of the Far East says that those who have come from Uzbekistan work primarily in the service sector while thse from Tajikistan work instead in construction, an arrangement that “is creating favorable conditions for the appearance of organized criminal groups” (svpressa.ru/society/news/492608/).
These nationally distinct immigrants, Kotkov continues, thus represent not just a threat to Russians, especially if they number more than five percent in any city or region, but also to each other as they struggle to expand their positions in the Russian economy in the course of competing for work.
In his remarks, Kotkov does not address another aspect of this situation: the experiences of these various national segments of the Central Asian migrants now in Russia may make them more nationalistic and thus become a problem for relations in their home countries when they eventually return there.
A decade ago, Russian and Central Asian scholars pointed to the way in which migrants from Central Asia were being radicalized in Islamic terms by their experiences in Russia (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/10/gastarbeiters-in-russia-contributing-to.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/11/isis-finds-it-easier-to-recruit-central.html).
That trend has received relatively less attention in recent years, but Kotkov’s observations suggest the ethnic radicalization of such migrants has replaced that earlier phenomenon and may prove to be an even larger problem for the Russian Federation now and for the countries of Central Asia in the future.
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