Central Asian Countries Preparing for Potentially Deleterious Impact of Massive Return of Migrant Workers from Russia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 13 – Central Asian countries, especially Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, face the prospect that many of their nationals now working in the Russian Federation will soon return home, creating a variety of problems ranging from a decline in transfer payments to tensions in the workplace to the growth of Islamist radicalism.

            Russian commentators suggest that tensions between returning migrants and workers who never left home have already begun to grow, but they say that transfer payments have not yet fallen because rising incomes have allowed remaining migrants to send home even more money (ritmeurasia.ru/news--2026-10-13--chem-grozit-uzbekistanu-massovoe-vozvraschenie-trudovyh-migrantov-90915).

            Central Asian governments are increasingly worried about both of these problems, but looming behind them is another which while far more difficult to quantify may prove to be more serious: the radicalization national and Islamist of Central Asians who have worked in Russia and who are now returning home.

            That Central Asian migrants who experience Russian xenophobia and then go home should become both more nationalist and even Islamist is not surprising. Russian observers have been speculating about this for some time, although more often, such writers have complained about the ways they see Central Asians radicalizing Muslim peoples in the Russian Federation.

            For discussions of some of these articles in the Russian media, see  windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/12/migrants-from-central-asia-in-russian.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/07/central-asian-migrants-radicalizing.html windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/11/isis-seen-spreading-into-russia-via-new.html,  and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/10/any-large-scale-return-of-kyrgyz.html.)

            If in fact, the return of large numbers of Central Asian migrant workers from Russia to their Central Asian homelands does trigger more nationalism or Islamist activism there, these discussions are likely to intensify, with some in Russia likely to argue that expelling more migrants is a necessary move and others saying that it could trigger a disaster instead.