Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Domestic migrations

China has to deal with millions of internal migrants, mostly illegal. Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, attracts hundreds of thousands of rural Nigerians, and in Jos violence between "natives" and "migrants" seems to be endemic. Mexican cities lure rural people hoping for better lives. The southern edges of Tehran are shanty towns full of poor Iranians. And Moscow, too, faces the problem of internal migrations. Complicating all of these are cleavages between the national groups that migrate and those who stay put.

How do governments and political systems deal with the people and the issues that surround them?

Kathy Lally reported the following for The Washington Post.

Poor Central Asians migrate to Moscow

Twenty years after independence, a flood of Central Asians looking for work washes over Moscow, turning it into a city of migrants…

Moscow, a city of 11.5 million according to last year’s census, has as many as 5 million migrants, more than half of them undocumented. The migrants, many of them from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, exist on the fringes of society, harassed by police, victimized by employers and disliked by Russians, once their fellow Soviet citizens. The flawed policies of the old system, where the two countries were turned into cotton fields for the empire and dependent on Moscow, haunt the new nations still, long after the old ideology was discarded.

In Moscow, deep-seated prejudice against Central Asians (and people from Russia’s Caucasian mountains) gives restive young nationalists a target for their anger…

The migrants come anyway, driven by desperation. Despite all obstacles, they have created an important economy of their own. There are more Uzbeks here than Tajiks: Uzbekistan has a population of nearly 28 million. But Tajikistan is one of the world’s poorest countries, and close to a million of its 7 million people are working in Russia. Last year they sent home $2.3 billion, about 45 percent of that country’s GDP, according to the National Bank of Tajikistan…

Citizens of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan can enter without visas, but encounter three sets of daunting problems, said Anastasia Denisova, an advocate for migrants at the nongovernmental Committee for Civil Assistance.

Residency and work permits are required, but limited by quota and the difficulties of traversing a hard-to-navigate bureaucracy. A whole industry has arisen, Denisova said, selling fake documents — $375 to $450 for a residency permit, about $630 for a work permit. “Even those who try hard to get legal papers are pushed out of the legal system and made to feel like criminals,” she said.

Once they get work, employers may abuse workers and fail to pay them, leaving the migrants little recourse. Without contracts, a boss could simply say he has never seen the complainant before…

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Labels: cleavages, demographics, economics, politics, Russia