Paul Goble
Staunton, July 17 – As many as 800,000 Central Asian migrant workers have become citizens of the Russian Federation over the last decade, Daler Rakhimov and Oksana Morgunov say, a figure that is seldom factored in when Russian officials focus on the decline of such workers since that time from 4.4 million to about half that figure.
What the two specialists at Moscow’s Lumumba Friendship University do not say may be more important: While the Kremlin may be pleased by the large number of Central Asians who are now Russian citizens, many Russians are alarmed by what some of them see as a dilution of the Russianness of the Russian Federation.
The two present their arguments in favor of a figure that Russian officials seldom acknowledge in an article in the Post-USSR journal (postussr.org/journals/240705/13.pdf) that has now been summarized at https://ia-centr.ru/experts/ia-centr-ru/tendentsii-trudovoy-migratsii-v-tsentralnoy-azii/.
Rakhimov and Morgunov also say that despite the recent decline in the number of Central Asian migrant workers in Russia, the product of both Russian hostility to them and efforts by Central Asian countries to diversify the countries to which their citizens go, Russia remains and will remain the most important place for migrants from that region to go.
On the one hand, they write, this flow is large and the amount of money the Central Asian countries get from transfer payments is as well. And on the other, establishing alternative routes will require that the governments of the region overcome both administrative barriers and popular assumptions, neither of which is likely to happen soon.
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