Migrant immobilities in the periphery: insights from the Vietnam-Russia corridor

Abstract

Migration and mobility tend to be used interchangeably in migration studies. This runs the risk of oversimplifying migrants’ (im)mobility aspirations and capability, taking for granted their agency and control of their own migration trajectory. Drawing on ethnographic research on Vietnamese migrants trading at Moscow markets, this paper offers original insights into migrant immobilities, highlighting the social technologies and social imaginaries that arise from their gendered, raced, and classed experiences of immobilisation. Migrants’ immobilities, whether voluntary or involuntary, have a profound impact on their sense making of self and aspirations for the future. The study enriches our understanding of the complex relationship between migration and mobility and the various ways in which it shapes social practice, identity and belonging.

Keywords:

• Migration
• immobilities
• aspiration
• Vietnamese migrants
• Russia

Migrant immobilities – a theoretical gap

The fact that not everyone in developing countries aspires to migrate has been increasingly recognised in migration studies (Cohen 2002; Hoang and Yeoh 2012; Schewel 2020). Immobility, as Schewel (2020, 331) explains, could be a result of structural constraints on the capability to migrate and/or as a reflection of the aspiration to stay. Indeed, empirical studies in various contexts show that immobility can be considered desirable by many people, especially those with economic capital and access to decent income-generating opportunities locally (Cohen 2002; Hoang and Yeoh 2012; Mata-Codesal 2015). Although the emergent scholarship on non-migrant immobilities offers important insights into the ongoing socio-economic transformations in the Global South, its silence on migrant immobilities somehow affirms the common assumption about the straightforward causal relationship between migration and mobility, obscuring the fact that migrants can be immobilised at any point during their migration processes.

Immobilities are the reality that forcibly displaced people and victims of human trafficking routinely face both in transit and at the destination (Campbell 2006; Sommers 2001; Yea 2016) but not until recently have researchers started paying attention to the immobilisation of ‘voluntary’ migrants including those move through formal channels. Recent work by Haugen (2012) on Nigerians in China and Bélanger and Silvey (2020) on migrant care workers demonstrates that immobilities are integral to the migration experiences of people in a wide range of contexts, especially those facing racial/religious discrimination and disenfranchisation at the destination. While non-migrant immobilities are mainly attributed to poverty (Carling 2002; Chatterji 2017), migrant immobilities tend to arise from the ambivalent treatment of the foreign Other whose labour is required for the globalised economy but whose personal attributes are deemed incompatible with the perceived racial and/or cultural homogeneity and superiority of the host society.

Mobilities and immobilities are thus two sides of the same globalisation coin. The self-contradictory nature of globalisation is widely acknowledged in both migration studies and the broader scholarship. In her ethnographic account of the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world, Tsing (2005, 5) remarks that the seemingly frictionless motion in today’s world would proceed ‘depending on what shoes we have to run in’. Globalisation brings down trade barriers and encourages transnational flows of information, labour, and goods while at the same time giving rise to processes of closure, entrapment, and containment (Núñez and Heyman 2007, 355; Shamir 2005, 199). The same macro-level structures that turn migration and mobility into the norm for the privileged can also immobilise others (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). People may be physically mobile but existentially stuck. Victims of capitalist exploitation can also be its strongest supporters because of the social mobility opportunities that it promises. As Córdoba Azcárate (2020) illustrates in her study of tourism in Yucatán, Maya labourers entrapped in the predatory capitalist system are deeply aware of their oppression and exploitation but at the same time appreciative the opportunities that it brings. The reality of migrant immobilities is best captured by Massey (1994, 149) who observes that in mobility ‘some people are more in charge of it than others; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it’.

By focusing on migrant immobilities in the Vietnam-Russia corridor, I make two interventions into the current debates on migration and (im)mobilities. First, my research highlights the entanglement of both voluntary and involuntary elements in people’s (im)mobility experiences. (Im)mobility outcomes tend to be distributed along a spectrum rather than in discrete categories. In Carling’s (2002, 5) ‘aspiration/ability model’, migration first involves a wish to migrate, and second, the realisation of this wish. Migration, he argues, requires both while immobility results from the lack of either one. ‘Wish’ can be interpreted in different ways. It could imply a need (out of necessity) or a desire, which is an yearning for something that is deemed good (Collins 2018). In some situations, the ‘wish’ to migrate means both. However, for many low-skilled migrants in peripheral corridors, migration per se is rarely an object of desire but just a palatable means to other desired ends (see Haugen 2012; Hoang 2020a, 2020b; Hoang and Yeoh 2012, for example). Most cases of migration from Vietnam to post-Soviet Russia could be characterised as ‘reluctant mobility’ rather than voluntary or involuntary. My research participants did not desire migration, mainly because they were aware of the risks and hardships awaiting them in Russia but staying put was not really an option because of the lack of local opportunities.

In his recent research, De Haas (2014) uses capability rather than ability to understand why people migrate and how (im)mobility outcomes relate to development. Building on Amartya Sen’s (1993) capability approach, which considers capabilities as (real/substantive) freedoms, De Haas conceptualises migration as a function of aspirations and capabilities to migrate within a given set of opportunity structures. The distinction between De Haas’s framework and Carling’s (2002) one is the former’s emphasis on people’s freedom to choose where to live, including the option to stay. My research in Russia shows that the notion of freedom is not absolute as it means different things to different people and, therefore, the aspiration/capability formula is not as straightforward as assumed. Freedom is, nevertheless, a key parameter that marks the distinction between migration and mobility. The lack of substantive freedom in deciding whether to migrate or stay put, to remain within the ethnic/migrant bubble on the outskirts of Moscow or venture beyond it, and to stay in Russia or return to Vietnam illustrates the irony of being stuck while on the move.

Second, I draw attention to the temporality and situatedness of migrants’ (im)mobility experiences. In the extant scholarship on immobilities, structural and personal forces tend to be treated as distinct analytical axes, but I shift attention to their intersections where emergent subjectivities and dispositions shape people’s responses to their immobilisation. Research shows that migration is an on-going process of subjective becoming (Collins 2018) and migrant subjectivities are continually configured and reconfigured through a range of intersecting forces and processes (Silvey 2004, 499). This explains why migrants from different backgrounds respond differently to the same structural constraints and opportunities within any given migration regime (Hoang 2020a, 2020b) and how people experience migration and (im)mobility varies across their life course (Hoang 2011, 2016). In Russia, while disenfranchisement and xenophobia affect virtually every Vietnamese migrant I have met, how each individual acts in response to their immobilities varies along the lines of wealth, occupation, gender, education (especially Russian language skills), and stage in the life course.

In this paper, I place an emphasis on subjective and agentive dimensions of immobilities which co-exist with and reinforce socio-spatial ones. In what follows, I first provide a quick explanation of my study’s methodology before discussing the legal, institutional, and discursive forces that work together to immobilise foreign migrants in Russia. In this section, I highlight ‘othering’ as an important technology of government that the post-Soviet Russian state employs to keep migrants immobilised, exploitable and disposable. The power of these immobilising structures, however, is not absolute. As I demonstrate in the two sections that follow, they intersect with migrants’ gendered, classed, and raced imaginings of self, place and space to inform their everyday living and aspirations for the future. Immobilities provide migrants with a sense of security but at the same time accentuate their Otherness and marginalisation and inhibit their capacity to aspire.

Methodological notes

This paper draws from ethnographic research I conducted within Vietnamese communities in Moscow in 2013, 2014 and 2016. In total, it is based on 31 in-depth interviews, 26 life histories, over 400 pages of fieldnotes recording daily interactions during fieldwork, nearly 1,000 photographs, policy documents, and media materials in Vietnamese, Russian, and English. Ethnography allowed me to obtain in-depth, nuanced insights into people’s everyday lives while minimising intrusion into their daily routines. It enabled me to participate in migrants’ daily activities, experience market life first-hand, and place human agency at the centre of my analysis. Sadovod market (Садовод рынок),¹ which is about 30 kilometres south-east of Moscow city centre and one of the three Moscow markets with a large concentration of Vietnamese traders, was my main fieldsite but I also made regular visits to Yuzhnyie Vorota² market, Liublino³ market, legal and illegal garments factories in and outside the Moscow metropolitan region, migrant traders’ hostels and private homes, and several local schools that Vietnamese children were attending.

In total, primary data was sourced from 85 Vietnamese individuals aged from 25 to 60 who had been living in Russia between nine months and 27 years (Table 1). I did not plan my fieldwork with any specific sampling criteria in mind as I had anticipated difficulties in participant recruitment due to the time-intensive nature of the market regime and the precarious, isolating existence of irregular migrants in Moscow. The interlocutors, therefore, participated on a spontaneous, voluntary basis. Because market trade is primarily a female activity in Vietnamese culture (see Leshkowich 2011, for example), there are more women in my study (61 per cent), and most of participants are irregular migrants (92 per cent). The interviews and life histories were transcribed verbatim and, together with fieldnotes, theme-coded in NVivo – a computer software for qualitative data analysis.

Table 1. Demographic profile of research participants.

Gender	Male	33	Occupation	Market trader	43
	Female	52		Garment workshop worker	8
Marital status	Married	65		Garment workshop owner	6
	Single	11		Nanny	6
	Divorced	5		shop assistant	5
	Separated	3		itinerant vendor	4
	Widowed	1		broker	4
Migration status	Irregular migrant	78		odd manual jobs	5
	Permanent resident	5		long-distance merchant	2
	Russian citizen	2		White collar workers	2

Migrant othering as a technology of government

Russia hosted around 11.6 million international migrants in 2019, making it the second most important migration destination in the world (UN DESA, 2019). With such a large immigrant population, post-Soviet Russia has been listed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM 2019, 37) as one of the ten largest sources of remittances since 2005. Most migrants in Russia are citizens of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS⁴) but an increasing number come from China and Vietnam. The history of Vietnamese migration to Russia began with the official education and contract labour programs between war-torn and debt-stricken Vietnam and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. Official records indicate that a total of 217,183 Vietnamese citizens were employed as contract workers in the Eastern European socialist bloc over the 1981–1990 period and 42 per cent of them, or 92,000, were female (MOLISA 1995). They mostly worked in construction, mechanics, textiles, garment production, agriculture, health care, and education (Nguyen 2009, 10).

By the end of 1991, approximately 80 per cent of Vietnamese workers had left Russia and other Eastern European countries, often under official repatriation programs (Dang, Tacoli, and Hoang 2003, 12), but many subsequently found their way back when confronted with the harsh realities of the then-struggling Vietnamese economy, bringing with them families and friends. The Vietnamese population in Russia has been growing continually ever since. Hailing predominantly from North and North Central Vietnam, migrants typically travel to post-Soviet Russia with student or tourist visas acquired through commercial brokers. Because Vietnamese migration to post-Soviet Russia is largely of a clandestine nature, it is impossible to accurately gauge the number of Vietnamese migrants, and estimates vary widely. In 2007, the Vietnamese government estimated that there were between 80,000 and 100,000 Vietnamese nationals in Russia⁵ but another source suggests a higher figure of 150,000 (Nožina 2010, 229).

Post-Soviet Russia maintains restrictive immigration policies on the one hand and turns a blind eye to the growing presence of irregular migrants on the other. As Vietnamese migrants tend to enter Russia legally at first, illegality often presents itself in three main forms: overstaying the original visa; living at a place different from the registered address; and engaging in paid employment without a work permit/patent. In situations where the migrant can obtain a valid document, such as a work permit or a dependent visa, both of which are usually valid for 3 years and cost about US$3,500 at the time of my fieldwork in 2014, they do so via informal channels with the assistance of commercial brokers. The possession of these documents does not guarantee legal status because migrants are neither sure of their authenticity nor able to demonstrate that they are currently living at the registered address. It is not uncommon for brokers to register thousands of migrants to a single residential unit, which is referred to as an ‘elastic apartment’ in the Russian media,⁶ a practice that seems to be prevalent across Vietnamese communities in Eastern Europe (see also Nožina 2010, 237). This ‘irregular legality’, therefore, does not necessarily keep migrants immune from abuse, money extortion, or arbitrary detention by police or Federal Migration Service (FMS⁷) officers.

Vietnamese migrants in Russia mostly earn their living from market trade, mainly because formal employment opportunities are beyond their reach due to their irregular status, limited Russian language skills, and racial discrimination in the formal economy. Kamenskiy (2002, 94) estimates that 91.6 per cent of Vietnamese migrants in Russia are employed in trade and commerce, often without work permits, a figure much higher than what is reported for Central and Eastern European countries (about 70 per cent) (Williams and Balaz 2005, 545). Given the unpredictable nature of market trade and routine anti-immigration crackdown campaigns, migrant lives in post-Soviet Russia are highly precarious. Unable to access formal income opportunities , legal recourse, and formal social protection, they have no choice but to accept an exploitative market regime, which is exacerbated by the hefty cost of police’s protection racketeering that sustains large parts of Russia’s vast shadow economy. Although the monthly store rental rate varies widely from RUB600,000–700,000⁸ (USD17,000–20,000) at Liublino to RUB330,000–600,000 at Sadovod and RUB20,000–RUB35,000 at Yuzhnyie Vorota, it remains exploitative relative to the income that traders at the respective markets can earn. Stores must be kept open long hours every day if traders are to sustain the rent, labour costs, and daily living expenses. While a small number of traders, especially those working at Liublino market, are relatively successful, most manage to generate just a small margin of profit, and many would count themselves lucky if they earn enough to get by. A typical workday is from 5am to 6 pm and it is common for migrants to take only one day off per year, albeit not by choice, when the market is closed on the first of January for New Year celebrations. When time becomes a currency, every day off work, or even a reduction in trade hours, is a luxury for many.

The end of the millennium saw a radical shift in state discourse and public sentiments toward foreign migrants in Russia, as evidenced by the reorientation of FMS’s mandate from humanitarian assistance for refugees and displaced people to immigration control and policing. As immigrants come to be seen as a security threat, FMS officers are allowed to conduct random, arbitrary document checks in public places and private homes. The authorization of spot-checks has inadvertently subjected immigrants to new forms of harassment and extortion, opening up a lucrative source of cash income from protection racketeering for FMS and police officers. At the same time, media and government’s reports routinely associate irregular migration with crime, fraud, and violence, which is exacerbated by journalists’ penchant for clickbait, sensationalized and exaggerated headlines. An article on the state-owned ITAR-TASS,⁹ for example, reports the number of ‘illegal’ migrants in Russia as three million in 2014, but adds the highlighted subhead ‘Migrants committed 47,000 crimes last year’.¹⁰ The same article also cites a report commissioned by the Institute of National Strategy that highlights ‘three main characteristics of migrants since 2000’, including cultural backwardness, poor skills, and a demographic imbalance in their areas of residence. Prior to its closure, the notorious Cherkizovsky¹¹ market was often portrayed by Russian media as one of the most glaring manifestations of the dark sides of Russia’s shadow economy.

Such a negative portrayal of foreign migrants serves to justify stricter immigration policies and even the use of force in anti-immigration campaigns. Anti-immigrant sentiments are particularly directed to the racial Other from outside the European part of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Africa. Migrants from Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus (a.k.a. Transcaucasia) are generally viewed in a negative light because of their perceived links with criminal activities and terrorism, respectively, and therefore more likely to be subjected to document checks, fines, detentions, and deportations (Davé 2014, 2). However, statistics shows that local Russians tend to be more hostile to Asian migrants. Chinese and Vietnamese migrants are more likely to be targeted by xenophobic youth gangs because of their distinct racial and cultural backgrounds and limited Russian language skills, which is believed to threaten the cultural identity of local populations and the social harmony of Russian society. Quantitative surveys on local Russians’ attitude to foreign migrants show that the Chinese and the Vietnamese are the least popular ethnic groups, but the level of tolerance towards the Chinese (73 per cent) is almost twice as high as that towards the Vietnamese (Yudina 2005, 598). In 2008, the Center for Information and Analysis (SOVA), a Moscow-based nonprofit organization specializing in research and informational work on nationalism and racism, recorded 515 racist attacks, 96 of which were fatal. Although the figures have decreased significantly (to 72 and nine, respectively, in 2016)¹² thanks to the government’s crackdown, there is no solid evidence showing that xenophobic sentiments have abated. Rising xenophobia and migration securitisation are not a Russia-specific phenomenon but have been observed across post-communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe, where local populations feel their ‘ethnic purity’ and ‘cultural homogeneity’ are being threatened by rising tides of non-white migrants (Drbohlav 2000; Haerpfer and Wallace 1998; Pieke et al. 2004).

Russia’s porous borders and an easily accessible shadow economy may give us an illusion that migration and mobility are unimpeded, but it is precisely the laxness of the migration regime that immobilises migrants. The state’s ambivalent attitude toward foreign migrants and the xenophobic sentiments that it tacitly approves foments a pervasive sense of uncertainty and vulnerability among the Vietnamese migrants that I met in Russia, compelling them to cluster together in isolated ‘ethnic enclaves’ in and around suburban wholesale markets, avoid contact with ethnic others wherever possible, and reduce their movement to a bare minimum. Immobilities research in other contexts has been focused on the legal, institutional, technological and material infrastructure that is deployed to rigorously monitor, contain, restrict, and block migrants’ mobilities (Bélanger and Silvey 2020; Haugen 2012; Johnson 2015; Lindquist 2018; Turner 2007). In Russia, immigrants are less likely to be immobilised by material, technological, or legal infrastructure than discursive and representational ones. As they are regarded as a threat to ethnically and culturally ‘homogeneous’ nation-states (Geiger 2013, 17), immaterial tools of othering, vilification, and exclusion become the most powerful immobilising forces that separate them from the ‘host’ population and confine them to the ethnic bubble on the margin of society. Russians’ sense of superiority over East Asian migrants (V. Larin 2012, 73) is reflected and reinforced by the representation of foreign migrants as a problem (Yudina 2005), criminals (Bayly 2004), and a security risk (Alexseev 2006; V. Larin 2012).

The isolation and immobilities experienced by Vietnamese migrants in Russia set them apart from Vietnamese diasporic communities in Eastern and Central Europe where the latter have flourished thanks to extensive transnational networks within and across the region (Hüwelmeier 2017; Schwenkel 2017). While scholars emphasise lingering effects of Cold War imaginaries on the relations between the Vietnamese and local Europeans, the fact that large numbers of Vietnamese migrants have become permanent residents and citizens in Eastern and Central European countries and the Vietnamese have even been officially recognised as an ethnic minority group in Czech Republic has contributed to easing their integration and bridging the social gap between them and local communities (Bodziany 2017; Hüwelmeier 2015; Svobodová and Janská 2016). The reality is starkly different in Russia where, as I illustrate in the next section, the lack of meaningful interpersonal contact between the migrant Other and local Russians sustains the seemingly unbridgeable gap between them (Alexseev 2006; A. Larin 2012), perpetuating distorted stereotypes and entrenching irrational fears about one another. In this ‘paradigm of suspicion’ (Shamir 2005, 199), the danger that migrants are believed to pose to Russia legitimates systems of closure and entrapment that not only block their access to the formal economy and prevent their spatial movement but also stymie their agency and aspirations for the future.

Immobilities and situated imaginaries

Space, Massey (1994, 2) notes, is not some absolute independent dimension, but constructed out of social relations. The spatial organisation of society and the production of the social are, therefore, intertwined. In the migrant bubbles that Vietnamese migrants are confined to, they are compelled to strip away the inessential in a bid for survival and, in so doing, encounter new ways of being. The extant scholarship reveals the variegated ways in which people are immobilised and yet it tells us very little about how migrants make sense of and respond to their immobilities. In his discussion of the ‘mobility regime’, Shamir (2005, 200) asks pertinent questions about the social technologies that facilitate it and the social imaginaries that sustain it. It is equally important to ask, I argue, what social technologies migrants develop in response to their immobilisation and what social imaginaries arise from it.

Except for illegal garment factory workers who are often locked up by their employers in isolated, abandoned buildings in rural areas, immobility is generally self-enforced for Vietnamese migrants in Moscow. The sense of vulnerability constitutes a powerful regulatory and disciplining force in migrants’ social lives, shaping how they navigate relationships and imagine possible futures. To reduce their movement and associated risks to a minimum, migrants often live in the vicinity of the market where they work, even if this means they must put up with basic living conditions in overcrowded migrant hostels or rented apartments. In migrant hostels, it is common for 15–20 people to share a room and up to 300 people to share a few bathrooms and a communal kitchen on each floor. Squalid living quarters become breeding grounds for both disease and conflict, giving parents no privacy and children – no play or study space. Due to the exploitative store rental rates and mobility restrictions, social events such as birthday celebrations are forgone or become low-key, casual get-togethers at the market during slack hours so that traders’ daily routines would not be disrupted. As I detail elsewhere, migrant parents cannot even afford to take time off to attend to important matters relating to their children’s education and have to outsource their guardianship to commercial intermediaries, which has devastating consequences in many situations (Hoang 2023). Commercial intermediaries, who are referred to as dịch vụ (service, literally), are often former students or former contract workers from the Soviet time with a certain level of Russian language proficiency. While they might not necessarily be better off than their fellow countrymen in terms of both economic standing and legal status, the ability to communicate in Russian and a greater exposure to Russians as a result give these (usually amateur) dịch vụs the needed confidence and insight into Russian ways of life, allowing them to establish themselves as vital bridges connecting Vietnamese communities with Russian society. As Vietnamese migrants’ lives are kept within the safe bounds of their ethnic bubble, dịch vụs play a crucial mediating role in instances when transgressing those invisible boundaries becomes unavoidable because migrants need to access public services or have run into trouble with the law.

However, like migration, immobilities are deeply classed, gendered, and racialized (Bélanger and Silvey 2020; Schewel 2020, 343). The degree of spatial immobilisation that Vietnamese migrants subject themselves to depends on what Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, 101) describe as their ‘position in the field’, that is, the specific capital they are endowed with and the perception they have of the field from a specific point they take in the field. Across contexts, gender has been found to be an important factor structuring migrants’ im/mobilities with women more likely to be trapped in situations of involuntary immobility, primarily due to their traditionally ascribed role as a carer and nurturer (Bélanger and Silvey 2020; Chatterji 2017; Hoang 2011). In Moscow, however, Vietnamese women have learned to play gender to their advantage since they realised that they would be treated with leniency during police raids, spared from spot checks, and less likely to be harassed and extorted by police if they were pregnant or had care duties (as demonstrated by a young child in their company). Mothers excitedly described to me their new-found sense of freedom when they walked down to the local grocery store with a baby in the stroller, not having to nervously look over their shoulders every minute. There was a large-scale raid of Belaya Dacha – an immigrant suburb about four kilometers east of Sadovod market – during my fieldwork on 20 May 2014. Without warning, FMS and police forces swarmed over the suburb from early morning, fenced off dozens of residential blocks where foreign migrants concentrated, and stopped every pedestrian and vehicle for document checks. Anyone without a valid migration document would be apprehended immediately. Still shaken but obviously relieved, one of my interlocutors – a 38-year-old mother of two named Hoài – told me when we met at Sadovod later that morning that she was seized immediately after she exited her building but released as soon as the officers saw the picture of her 2-year-old daughter in her passport. Hoài travelled to Moscow four years ago as a tourist and had not obtained any migration document since her 30-day tourist visa expired.

For most Vietnamese migrants in Russia, both economic and cultural capital matters when it comes to physical mobility. Although never considered a magic wand by my interlocutors, a valid document such as a work permit or a dependent visa can protect them from the worst outcomes such as detention and deportation when intercepted by Russian police. Such a document, therefore, enables greater degrees of mobility, allowing migrants to travel to Vietnam to visit their children on a regular basis and to venture outside their ethnic bubble and the home-market daily route with a relative sense of security. However, only a fraction of the Vietnamese migrants I met during fieldwork could afford a work permit or a dependent visa due to its prohibitive cost and the treacherous nature of the brokerage industry. Even if they are fortunate enough to have one, local movement is still kept at a minimum because of the risk of police entrapment and interception at public transport nodes. Unable to communicate effectively in Russian, the prospect of coming face to face with (usually armed) policemen who are most likely to be twice their size is terrifying. Migrants with valid documents still risk being harassed, extorted, or even detained by Russian police just because they cannot answer the latter’s questions or appear suspiciously nervous. Therefore, outing opportunities that would require migrants to deviate from the daily grind, including social visits, sightseeing trips, and attendance at public celebrations or entertainment events tend to be enjoyed only by a few well-to-do brokers and garment workshop owners whose livelihoods do not involve renting at the market and who can afford private transport as well as the financial and opportunity costs associated with such occasions.

The lack of meaningful social contact with local Russians (beyond the daily haggling in broken Russian at the market) is evident in migrants’ narratives about Russian culture and society, which primarily draw from old tales about the legendary ‘Russian goodness’ propagated by Vietnamese returned migrants during Soviet time on the one hand and gruesome details of the high-profile racially-motivated murders on the other hand (see Hoang 2020b for details). The conversations I had with Vietnamese migrants about Russian people rarely had a dispassionate, mundane tone but often tilted towards one of the two extremes. My interlocutors either excessively adulated the kindness, generosity, and civility of Russian people, often without substantive personal experiences to back it up, or blew out of proportion the risk of violence that seemed to be awaiting them at every street corner. Whether the imagined Russian emerged in these narratives as a benevolent grandma or a murderous hooligan, they appeared alien and distant as if they existed in a different universe. Every now and then I would hear my interlocutors draw comparisons between ‘Russian goodness’ and ‘Vietnamese ugliness’ (Người Việt xấu xí) as manifest in the unhealthy behaviour of their compatriots at the market. This is exemplified by a quote from 39-year-old market trader Tùng below:

We Vietnamese can never become as civilized as Russians; I must admit. I adore Russian people. They are gentle and honest, not lưu manh [thuggish or crooked] (like us). Those who come to the market on Saturday and Sunday are so gentle and polite.

My interlocutors were keenly aware that they were not only different from but also unwelcome by Russians. Some even believed that the hostility against them could be justified because they had imported ‘vices’ from their homeland, polluted Russian society, and corrupted Russian bureaucrats. The little contact with and limited knowledge about the ‘host’ population accentuate their sense of being an unwanted racial other and disrupt their ontological security which, as I discuss in the next section, undermines their capacity to imagine the future.

Space, place, and aspiration

Space and place are instructive for understanding migrant lives as space- and place-based experiences inform people’s social practice and aspirations. In Moscow, how migrants’ subjectivities are enacted, and their futures are projected, is deeply embedded in their precarious, transient, and isolated existence on the margins of the society that they barely know about. Displaced but immobilised, very few people that I met aspired to settle down permanently in Russia. While virtually every market trader and market-based business owner in my study had invested in real estate in Vietnam, only three of my 85 research participants owned at least a property in Moscow. As of 2016, a two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs of Kotelniki, Belaya Dacha, and Kapotnya, where many migrants working at Sadovod rented, cost around RUB 6 million (about USD 100,000) – a very affordable price compared to a similar property in Hà Nội. It would have been a good investment, given that rent often accounted for a large proportion of migrants’ monthly expenses and many had been living in Russia for decades without any firm plans to return to Vietnam any time soon. While they took delight in Russia’s clean environment, superior public services, and civility in everyday life, it was generally seen as a phase in one’s life, not a place fit for permanent settlement. ‘Russia is for Russians, not for us’, Quang – a 40-year-old Liublino trader – told me, letting out a sigh after saying how much he liked the country and regretted not being able to settle down permanently. Many successful traders like him could easily afford local properties and arrange for all family members to be naturalised as Russian citizens but a lifetime of social and physical immobilities was not a prospect that they wished to entertain. In rare cases where migrants had invested a small fortune in acquiring Russian citizenship or permanent residency, it was often described as a measure to ‘minimize trouble’, not an indication of their plan to live permanently in Russia.

Immobilisation particularly troubles first-generation migrants in their 20s and 30s who live precariously off market trade, waged labour, and garment production, especially if they have young children to provide for. Uncertain how longer their sojourn in Russia will last, migrant parents often leave their children behind with the extended family or send them to Vietnam after birth to ensure educational stability for them (see Hoang 2023 for a detailed discussion of transnational care). The parent-child separation stretches throughout the latter’s childhood in many situations, with damaging consequences for both marital and intergenerational relationships. In my interlocutors’ narratives, migration to Russia is often described as ‘the only choice’, ‘a sacrifice’, something done ‘for survival’, ‘for money’, or ‘for my children’s future’, and not expressing the migrant’s desire for adventure, freedom, or a new and better life away from home as we tend to see in other contexts (see Carling 2002; Langevang and Gough 2009; Margold 2004; Salazar 2010, for example). In other words, migration is imperative but not desirable. It has brought them money but taken away their freedom. As illustrated below by a quote from 39-year-old single mother Ly, the life of sacrifice and hardship that migrants were enduring in Russia was often contrasted with a relaxing and pleasurable life that they imagined people in Vietnam were enjoying:

Life is hard, too hard here. It is so much better at home. If you have money and live in Vietnam, you would just hang out at cafes and restaurants all day, showing off your fancy car. Life is just beautiful (there)! We came here (Russia) just to make money…life is too hard here.

Arriving in Russia at the onset of market trade decline (marked by the closure of Cherkizovsky market in 2008) and with limited start-up capital, if any, younger migrants struggle to make ends meet. In the conversations I had with them, Russia was often likened to a big prison in which they were held captive by both hope and despair. The monotonous work-sleep routine and the financial rewards that were both meager and unstable disheartened them but the unpredictable nature of market trade in Russia’s shadow economy promised life-changing opportunities which would be near impossible should they decide to return home. Every migrant I spoke to would say: ‘Chán lắm rồi!’ (So sick and tired!) in response to my question about whether they were enjoying their lives in Russia but maintained ‘ở đến khi nào không ở được thì thôi’ (I’ll stay until it is no longer possible to do so) when I asked if they had any plans to leave Russia soon. None of them could give a definitive end date for their sojourn. Unable to predict or control their immediate future, they took one day at a time. The situation was particularly depressing for workers at illegal garment factories, as expressed by 26-year-old man named An below:

We’re just going with the flow. I don’t plan things ahead because things never go according to plan. Here, in Russia … we just sit and watch our youth go down the drain.

Although illegal garment factories are relatively secure thanks to local police’s protection racketeering and their concealed locations, they are still vulnerable to raids organised by the FMS and federal police. To prevent detection, owners lock up their workers in the factory which is often the dark basement of a city building or an abandoned structure in a remote rural area. The factory is referred to as a ‘prison in prison’ (the latter of which meant Russia) by my interlocutors. New workers are often recruited in Vietnam and have their trips organised by factory owners and their brokers. Upon their arrival in Moscow, they would be driven straight from the airport to the factory where they would do 12-hour shifts and spend the other half of the day in a single bunk bed shared with another worker who does the alternate shift. Dozens of workers work, eat, sleep, and socialize within the same make-shift facility, access to which is securely guarded and strictly monitored by the factory owner. The long-term exposure to bright light, noise, and polluted air causes many health problems such as vision loss, sleep disorders, and respiratory diseases. Given such squalid and prison-like conditions, fire in xưởng may đen is often deadly. The consequences of police raids are no less serious because workers do not have the capacity to deal with such a situation. In the following quote, Thái, a 29-year-old market trader at Sadovod, recalled the first time he came face to face with the brutal Russian winter when the illegal garment factory that he worked for at that time was raided by the police:

The first time I ran away from the police, I nearly died. I had been locked up inside a basement for six months from the first day in Russia, then moved to the fifth floor of the same building for another year, still locked up. I had never gone out for one and a half years. How could I know how cold Russian winter could be? Then one day the police came, without any warnings. I sprinted out. It was freezing! I stood and waited in the snow for more than an hour. It was minus 30 degrees Celsius. I had never worn winter clothes since I arrived in Russia; never needed to as I had never left the building. I did not know it could be so cold outside. Then I suffered from pneumonia for a month, drifting in and out of high fever in bed and coughing my lungs out. I still count myself lucky. I could have lost my legs had I stayed outside a little longer.

Workers escaping from police raids, I was told, risk dying of hypothermia when hiding outside in sub-zero temperatures, and several have lost their lives in those situations. In December 2014, for example, Báo Nga, a Vietnamese language electronic media outlet, reported that three Vietnamese undocumented workers had run from a police raid and lost their lives to hypothermia in a nearby field.¹³ Some more fortunate workers had their frostbitten legs amputated after dunking them in snow for hours.

The outlook for Vietnamese migrants became even bleaker as my fieldwork progressed. Migrants were dealt with successive crises in 2014 beginning with the armed conflict in Ukraine and the economic sanctions imposed by the West, which was followed by a big fire that burned down dozens of stores at Sadovod market together with all the merchandise and cash stocked inside of them. Economic stagnation and disrupted trade flows resulted in a devastating financial crisis in the second half of 2014. By December 2014 the exchange rate had plummeted to 80 roubles to one U.S. dollar while it was only 33 roubles to one U.S. dollar in January 2014. The dream of striking gold like many of their predecessors, which had brought younger migrants to Moscow, seemed more distant each day but returning to Vietnam empty-handed was not an option because of both the shame of failed migration and the prospect of unemployment awaiting them back home. The causal relationship between migration and mobility is readily assumed in Vietnamese society (Carruthers 2002, 439), as affirmed by a 43-year-old broker named Tuyết below:

We are under an immense pressure to make money. It’s a disgrace to return home empty-handed!’

Unable to achieve the financial goals of their migration but reluctant to give up their hope of finding a life-changing opportunity for themselves and their families, many migrants in my study are caught in a frustrating state of limbo. Life, relationships, and planning for the future are all put on hold while they wait for luck to find them. Here, people are immobilised, and not mobilised, by their migration. To make today’s hardship and sacrifices liveable, they forge a future-oriented posture which, Appadurai (2004) contends, is central to one’s capacity to aspire. Vietnamese migrants’ constant anticipation of crisis and future-orientedness are the key technologies of the self (see Foucault 1991) that develop from the immobilities that they face during their extended transient existence in post-Soviet Russia.

Conclusion

My research in Moscow offers nuanced perspectives on the conceptual distinction between migration and mobility as well as the complex and dynamic nature of both mobilities and immobilities. It shows that feelings of immobility, stuckness, and entrapment are not exclusively non-migrants’ experiences but have become a common reality for subaltern migrants circulating in peripheral migration corridors. This ‘immobility in mobility’ (Bélanger and Silvey 2020) arises from the inner contradictions of neoliberal globalisation where migrant labour has become vital for the competitive capitalist economy but migrant bodies have come to be associated with the ’dark’ sides of globalisation including disease, crime, violence, and religious extremism. Migrant labour is, therefore, welcomed on the condition that migrant bodies are not free to circulate or remain at the destination after their ‘expiry dates’ (Hoang 2017).

Immobilities protect my interlocutors from immediate risks and dangers but they reduce their capacity to take control of their own lives and strip them of the freedom to aspire. My study challenges a common view in globalisation studies that cross-border spatial mobility is positively correlated to social upward mobility and the global/local binary is equated with privilege/deprivation (see Faist 2013, pp. 1638–1639). (Im)mobilities and people’s various ways of dealing with it reflect and reinforce the power hierarchies upon which the migration regime is predicated (see also Schewel 2020, 347). Immobilised and marginalised by both legislative restrictions and anti-immigration discourse, the Vietnamese in my study draw on sensationalised media headlines, migrant tales, and gossips in seeking explanation for their situation, thereby validating both the narratives about their racial inferiority and the inhumane migration regime of post-Soviet Russia. These social imaginaries further reinforce their efforts to restrict their own spatial mobility and liberty in future making practices.

The case of Vietnamese migrants in Moscow highlights the analytical value of immobilities in researching migrants’ social practice, identity, and belonging. How people conduct their day-to-day living, make sense of the world around them, and project the future is deeply embedded in what Yeoh et al. (2016) refer to as ‘stories-so-far’. Unable to call Russia home or return to Vietnam prematurely, migrants avoid putting their roots down so that an unwanted and unforeseen departure would cause minimum (financial) damage but in so doing, they reduce their prolonged sojourn in Russia to bare existence. Present and future are, as Cooper and Pratten (2015) observe, not disconnected horizons of social practice. Present disappointments are made ‘liveable’ by hope of future happiness and through ‘inhabiting the grounds of the present’, migrants react to the pasts and create their futures (Ahmed 2010, 9).

Ethics statement

This study has been approved by Human Research Ethics, The University of Melbourne, HREC number 1239220.1, December 2012

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my research participants in Russia for trusting me and sharing with me the stories that otherwise might not have had a voice. A big Thank You to Nguyễn Hà Đông who painstakingly transcribed all the recorded interviews and Nguyễn Thành Chung who coded my data in NVivo. This article received valuable and constructive feedback from Juan Zhang (Jessie) for which I am grateful.

Notes

1 Sadovod market (Садовод рынок) is commonly referred to as Birds’ market (Chợ Chim) by Vietnamese migrants due to its adjacency to a birds’ market (Птичий рынок).

2 Yuzhnyie Vorota (Южныe ворота – Southern Gates) is also known as km 19 market, a name deriving from its geographical location at km 19 on MKAD ring road (Moscow Automobile Ring Road – Московская Кольцевая Автомобильная Дорога).

3 The official name of Liublino (Люблино) market is Moscow Trade Complex (Tоргово-ярмарочный комплекс Москва). It is commonly referred to as Liublino market (or Chợ Liu by Vietnamese migrants) due to its proximity to the Liublino metro station.

4 The Commonwealth of Independent States consists of nine member States: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan; as well as two associate States: Turkmenistan and Ukraine.

5 Sài Gòn Giải Phóng, 17 January 2007. http://www.sggp.org.vn/chinhtri/2007/1/81930/. Accessed 12 January 2015.

6 Source: https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/the-propiska-sends-russia-back-to-the-ussr-20668. Accessed 21 July 2016.

7 Founded in 1992, the Federal Migration Service (Федеральная Mиграционная Cлужба – FMS) is Russia’s federal apparatus responsible for governing human movements of both forced and voluntary nature within and into the country.

8 The exchange rate was RUB30 = USD1 at the time of my first fieldwork trip in May–June 2013 and RUB36 = USD1 in April–June 2014. The value of the Russian rouble dropped sharply toward the end of 2014 due to economic sanctions following the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Ukraine, slumping to RUB80 = 1USD in mid-December 2014 before gradually recovering over the following two years. Because of the wide variations in the exchange rate over the 2013–2016 period, I convert the Russian rouble to US dollar each time money is mentioned according to the approximate exchange rate at that period of time.

9 ITAR-TASS is the Russian News Agency “TASS” (Информационное агентство России “ТАСС).

10 Source: http://itar-tass.com/en/russia/743702. Accessed 2 February 2015.

11 Cherkizovsky market (known to Vietnamese migrants as Chợ Vòm) – an infamous, expansive open-air market near Cherkizovsky metro station in Moscow – was reputedly Eastern Europe’s biggest trading ground until its closure in 2008.

12 Source: Old problems and new alliances: Xenophobia and radical nationalism in Russia, and efforts to counteract them in 2016, Natalia Yudina and Vera Alperovich, SOVA: Center for information and analysis, http://www.sova-center.ru/en/xenophobia/reports-analyses/2017/05/d36995/. Accessed 29 May 2017.

13 Source: Vỡ mộng đổi đời trên đất Nga: Cuộc trốn chạy thảm khốc [Dreams shattered in Russia: a fatal escape]. http://baonga.com/nguoi-viet-tai-nga.nd173/vo-mong-doi-doi-tren-dat-nga-cuoc-tron-chay-tham-khoc.i51806.html. Accessed 30 December 2014.