Regional migration report : Russia and Central Asia

Abstract

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has become one of the most important destinations for immigration in the world. It is also a very particular case of a destination country in which two types of flows have shaped the character of immigration. Massive waves of Russians returning to their ancestral (or actual) motherland from other republics dominated throughout the 1990s, diminishing in 2000s. At the same time, the growing Russian economy started to attract immigrant workers from other parts of the post-Soviet space, especially from less developed central Asian countries, namely Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Nowadays, they are the main working migrant group, whose presence is contested on cultural grounds. The Eurasian migration system is thus a central theme for migration research in the region. This report proposes a deep comparative analysis of the place of Russia and Kazakhstan (Russia’s emerging economic rival) in the Eurasian migration system. The analysis is accompanied by an analysis of data collection in Russia and the development of Russia’s migration policy.