Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 11 – During the first half of 2024, almost 393,000 Tajik migrant workers, 98.5 percent of whom had been in the Russian Federation, returned to Tajikistan, either because their work had ended or in response to the growing hostility among Russians toward migrants from Central Asia.
But while this flight was enormous, the Tajik migration service says, the number of Tajiks leaving their homeland to work abroad, again almost exclusively to the Russian Federation, was just over 324,000 – or some 85 percent of the total of those who had left Russia to return (mehnat.tj/ru/news/dt/27992682-25a6-4248-93c1-563ec790053b).
That means that the number of Tajik migrant workers in the Russian Federation has fallen but it has not collapsed as some observers had suggested, a point Russian commentator Aleksandr Shustov highlights in a new article (ritmeurasia.ru/news--2024-08-12--tadzhikskaja-trudovaja-migracija-v-rossiju-zametno-sokratilas-74995).
The reason for this pattern, one that is likely to continue even if Russian hostility to Central Asian migrant workers continues to rise, is that Tajiks need the income that jobs in Russia provide and that is the source of enormous transfer payments back to their families in Tajikistan, transfer payments that benefit the Tajikistan government as well.
But if that is the case, then there is another problem looming on the horizon: Tajiks going to Russia because of economic need are likely to be radicalized by Russian xenophobia, a development that sets the stage both for potentially violent conflicts inside the Russian Federation and the rise of an opposition movement in Tajikistan itself.
How these two governments will navigate those dangers, given that Russia needs migrant workers but doesn’t like them and that Tajiks and Tajikistan needs the income migrant workers provide, remains to be seen. But there is no question that there are problems ahead for both countries as long as this trend continues.
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