Keeping labour mobility informal: the lack of legality of Central Asian migrants in Kazakhstan

Abstract

Kazakhstan's legal–regulatory framework provides for a small number of quotas for highly skilled foreign workers but has no provisions for legal employment of semi-skilled or low-skilled migrants from the Central Asian states, who enter under the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) visa-free regime and work informally in construction, household and service sectors. The lack of acknowledgement of the scale of informal labour migration has denoted an act of strategic neglect on the part of the state, allowing it to render migrant labour illegal, disposable, and keep migrants legally and statistically invisible. Unable to obtain a legal status, migrants nominally comply with the existing legal framework as they also circumvent and subvert it. The article details the entrenched informal regime of labour migration and explains why recent efforts to ‘legalize’ labour through the introduction of a labour patent (licence), as is the case in Russia, are unlikely to bring in significant reforms.

Keywords:

• Kazakhstan
• labour migration
• legality
• informal networks
• corruption

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Deniz Kandiyoti and Natsuko Oka for feedback on an earlier draft of this paper; and two anonymous referees for comments.

Funding

This work was supported by a British Academy Small Research Grant during the period March 2011 to September 2012; by a Visiting Research Fellowship awarded by the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE), Chiba, Japan between October 2013 and March 2014; and by field research in Kazakhstan in October 2013 funded by the IDE.

Notes

1. Furthermore, almost half of Tajikistan's GDP depends on migrant remittances. An estimated third of Kyrgyzstan's economy and at least a quarter of Uzbekistan's GDP is also dependent on remittances.

2. The amendments to the Migration Law in 2013 as well as the Special Report on Migration by UNHCR Central Asia (2012), published by the government-constituted Human Rights Commission under the President of RK, avoid the term ‘illegal’, though they make various references to the need to ‘legalise’ migrant workers (Sultanov and Abishev 2013).

3. “Migranty pereveli iz Kazakhstana US$1.2 milliard.” Nur.kz, December 7, 2010. Accessed November 10, 2013. http://news.nur.kz/170273.html/

4. Of a total of 860,400 oralman who have settled in Kazakhstan during 1991–2011, 127,700 are families settled under government quotas and 94,200 settled on their own. Settlers from Uzbekistan comprised 51.1% in 2004–08 (UNHCR Central Asia 2012).

5. The Ministry of Labour and Social Protection provides such data to organizations making a special request. Reports by ILO, OSCE and IOM do not contain any information on allocation of quotas to CIS citizens. Local NGOs have also been unable to obtain this information.

6. Interview with Rinat Khamidullin in Shymkent, 19 September 2012.

7. Interview with Munavar Paltashova in Almaty, 27 September 2012.

8. This is based on information obtained in September 2011 when I crossed the Zhibek Zholy (known as Chenyaevka) from Tashkent to Shymkent and back.

9. “Who Robs the Citizens: Gastarbaiters or Internal Migrants?” (Vechernyi Almaty, January 8, 2008). http://www.vecher.kz/

10. Interview with Viktoria Tyuleneva, Kazakhstan Bureau of Human Rights and Rule of Law, Almaty, September 2011.

11. Interview with Izotullo Serimsakov, Head of the Consular Services, Embassy of Tajikistan in Astana, 18 August 2011. Serimsakov claimed to interact directly with the local Tajiks and provide them with his direct phone number for contact in any emergency. In contrast, he noted, Uzbekistani citizens shun contacts with their consulate. Uzbekistan has not yet opened an embassy in Astana and only maintains a consulate in Almaty.

12. Interview with Nazira Madieva, International Red Cross and Red Crescent, Astana, 15 September 2012.