“This one is from my first trip to Russia,” said Alisher Khudoyorov, showing a photo of him smiling at Moscow’s Red Square circa 2002. The 55-year-old Dushanbe, Tajikistan native spent almost a quarter of a century travelling to Russia yearly for seasonal employment, working everywhere from construction sites to restaurants in and around the country’s capital.
The same dusty old-school album with the image of young Khudoyorov in Moscow also has several photos of his two sons in Russia. “Stable work is still hard to come by [in Tajikistan] so my boys have followed me [to Russia],” said Khudoyorov, flashing a couple of gold teeth as he recounted his time in labor migration.
Khudoyorov’s story is not unique. Unable to find gainful employment in their economically stagnant countries, millions of Central Asians have turned to Russia in search of work and higher incomes since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
As this labor migration grew, it shaped both Central Asia and Russia.
Booming labor migration has allowed Central Asia’s undemocratic governments to avoid domestic demands to create jobs and provide public goods and services. Politically, migration serves as a pressure valve that prevents the buildup of unemployment-fueled social and political frustration, particularly among men and the youth.
It has also helped shape Russia – keeping it from a demographic collapse, helping its economy flourish, and supporting every one of Russia’s ambitious undertakings, from the 2014 Sochi Olympics to its foreign wars. The higher living standard for Russians, built on the backs of countless delivery drivers and cleaning staff from Central Asia, serves as a pressure valve for Russia, too. Labor migration has kept Central Asian countries economically and politically dependent on Russia, becoming a peculiar mirror of sorts for Russia’s own fate, its relationship with the world and with itself.
“Certain sectors of the Russian economy are so deeply dependent on labor migration that they would essentially be nonexistent without it,” Temur Umarov, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), told The Diplomat. “Muscovites who go abroad and complain there that taxi service is expensive and slow or that coffee is not tasty enough don’t think of how excellent customer service in Russia’s big cities is possible only because of cheap migrant labor.”