Becoming 'Legal' through 'Illegal' Procedures: The Precarious Status of Migrant Workers in Russia

Author(s): Bhavna Davé
Editor(s): Stephen Aris, Matthias Neumann, Robert Orttung, Jeronim Perovic, Heiko Pleines, Hans-Henning Schröder, Aglaya Snetkov
Series: Russian Analytical Digest (RAD)
Issue: 159
Pages: 2-8
Publisher(s): Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich; Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen; Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, George Washington University
Publication Year: 2014

Russias complex laws and elaborate procedures governing the status of migrant workers and a highly inadequate mechanism for their implementation push migrants to rely on numerous 'intermediaries' who dominate the shadow economy of migration on the basis of their close connections with officials. The path to becoming 'legal' require migrants to resort to a variety of semi-legal or outright illegal ('corrupt') transactions through the intermediaries in order to 'get things done.' Thus the laws and the informal or shadow mechanisms of their implementation, which have emerged to aid a 'legalization' of migrant workers, thrive on keeping a sizable proportion of them in a quasi-legal status, continuously facing the threat of illegalization, criminalization and deportation.

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