Rustamjon Urinboyev & Sherzod Eraliev. 2022. The Political Economy of Non‐Western Migration Regimes: Central Asian Migrant Workers in Russia and Turkey. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham. pp. 192.
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Author | H. Deniz Genç |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13081 |
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.
The authors begin in Chapter 1 by discussing whether we can really study non-western, non-democratic regimes
with tools and approaches developed in western democratic societies, arguing that due to informality, weak rule of
law and systematic corruption, migration laws and policies in non-western, non-democratic settings such as Russia
and Turkey are perceived and practiced differently. In such societies, ‘state law’ and ‘living law’ differ on the ground;
therefore, mere examinations of migration laws and policies do not help researchers understand and compare how
migration governance takes place in practice. For these non-western, non-democratic regimes, informal power struc-
tures, extralegal processes and negotiations that shape migration outcomes should also be considered. The book
thus responds to the growing literature arguing the necessity of advancing existing theories and regime typologies in
comparative migration studies beyond western-centric perspectives (e.g. Boucher & Gest, 2015; Breunig et al., 2012;
Urinboyev, 2020). It adopts a bottom-up approach to compare two non-western migration regimes through the lived
experiences of migrants via explorations of their agency and the outcomes of migration policy outputs on the ground.
Chapter 2 presents a comparative analysis of migration laws and policies developed in Russia and Turkey over
the last three decades. In contrast to earlier studies (e.g. Bashirov, 2018; Düvell, 2020), it underlines the unin-
tended consequences of these two migration regimes resulting from discrepancies between migration outputs
(migration laws, regulations and policies) and outcomes (actual implementation on the ground). In the case of
Russia, authorities took steps to reduce the scale of undocumented migration and tightened the laws, strengthened
the border infrastructure and introduced highly punitive measures in the 2010s, pushing migrants into irregular-
ity. In Turkey, the same decade witnessed the introduction of a comprehensive migration law with capacity- and
institution-building for migration management. Similar to Russia, Turkey keeps its liberal visa regime—attracting
migrant workers. Differently from it, Turkish authorities seem to accept cheap, docile, undocumented migrants. In
the absence of enforcement and controls, most of the migrants are undocumented, and they work in the informal
BOOK REVIEW
DOI: 10.1111/imig.13081
Received: 7 October 2022 Accepted: 24 October 2022
289
Int Migr. 2022;60:289–291. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/imig
Rustamjon Urinboyev & Sherzod Eraliev. 2022.
The Political Economy of Non-Western Migration
Regimes: Central Asian Migrant Workers in Russia
and Turkey. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham. pp. 192.
H. Deniz Genç
Department of Political Science and International Relations, Istanbul Medipol University, İstanbul, Turkey
Email: hdgenc@medipol.edu.tr
© 2022 International Organization for Migration.
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