Returning Home and Circular Mobility: How Crises Change the Anthropological View of Migration

Abstract

What new anthropological perspectives on migration are being opened as a result of the current economic crisis in Russia and the recent changes in migration policies that have forced migrants to return en masse to the countries of their origin? Today, the intent to return is built into the strategies of Central Asian migrants and most of them think of eventually coming back and use occasional opportunities for traveling to their home countries every once in a while. I discuss various models of circular cross-border mobility (long-term, seasonal, rotational) as well as practices ensuing from the migrants’ state of deportability, factors affecting their preparedness for return, and their sense of nostalgia for the transnational migrant life. I argue that the post-Soviet space is in dynamic sync with recurrent economic rises and falls, contributing to a sense of uncertainty that may mean that migrations will keep unfolding in changing patterns following abrupt turns in the social life of the past and current decades.

Keywords:

• migration
• mobility
• transnationalism
• return migration
• circular migration
• Central Asia
• Russia

Notes

1. Data providing numbers of foreign citizens on the territory of Russia were being published until April 2016 on the website of the FMS [Federal Migration Service], but the website ceased after the dissolution of the latter.

2. It appears that some foreign citizens do not leave, but obtain citizenship from Russia, resulting in their “disappearance” from the statistics. According to FMS data, the overall number of new citizens in 2013–15 comprised about half a million and the annual number was growing. While it is hard to say what proportion was former citizens of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, it was probably not predominant. Nevertheless, a significant group of migrants from this region, perhaps 200,000 to 300,000, obtained citizenship from Russia in the 2000s and were not included in statistical migrational accounting. They continue to live a typical migration-prone life, closely interacting with the former motherland and even planning to return there.

3. See “Statisticheskie svedeniia po migratsionnoi situatsii,” Statistika Ministerstva vnutrennikh del (https://мвд.рф/Deljatelnost/statistics/migracionnaya). After the dissolution of the FMS, only data for 2016 remained available to the public. Prohibitions on entry most often function as a deferred measure, when the migrant has left Russia and is attempting to re-enter.

4. “Statistika vneshnego sektora Tsentral’nogo banka Rossii,” Statistika Tsentral’nogo banka Rossii (www.cbr.ru/statistics/? Prtid=svs&ch=Par_17101#CheckedItem).

5. V.I. Mukomel’ notes that another 8–9 percent of circular migrants were not taken into account precisely because of their departure when the research was conducted (Mukomel’ 2012, p. 241, note 8).

a. One of the main and tragic tasks of Tajik leader Davlat Khudonazarov, Aga Khan foundation representative in Moscow, is to regularly send home to their families the bodies of Tajik migrants who died in Russia, especially on dangerous construction projects in Moscow.

b. The other articles included in this important theme number are: E. V. Borisova “Ne stala zdorovat’sia – vot shto znachit ezdit v Rossiiu!: vozvrashchenie detei migrantov kak predmet moral’nykh suzhenii v Tajikistane” Etnographicheskoe obozrenie 2017, no. 3, pp. 16-31; O. E. Brednikova “(Ne)vozvrashchenie: mogut li migrant stat’ byvshimi?” Etnographicheskoe obozrenie 2017, no. 3, pp. 32-47; V. M. Peshkova “Zhiznennye plany trudovykh migrantov iz Srednei Asii v Rossii: narrativy i praktiki” Etnographicheskoe obozrenie 2017, no. 3, pp. 48-62; G. A. Sabirova “ ‘Vozvrashchenie posle vozvrashcheniia’: povtornaia trudovaia migratsiia v Rossiu” Etnographicheskoe obozrenie 2017, no. 3, pp 63-75. Olga Brednikov’s article was published in this journal as “(Non)-Return: Can Migrants Become Former Migrants?” 2017, Vol. 56, no. 3-4, pp. 298-320. See also Madeleine Reeve’s excellent monograph, Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).