The political economy of non-western migration regimes: Central Asian migrant workers in Russia and Turkey

Abstract

Building on a multi-sited transnational ethnography of Central Asian migrant workers in Moscow and Istanbul, legal ethnographers Urinboyev and Eraliev compare Russian and Turkish migration regimes by focusing on Central Asian migrants' experiences of agency, struggles, alliances, negotiations and interactions in arenas including migrants' inter-nal lifeworlds and social networks, migrant labor markets, documentation and legalization practices, shadow econo-mies and street institutions. The book relies on field studies in Moscow, Russia and Istanbul, Turkey, where data were collected through observations, informal interviews, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews.