7. Informality and Migrant Agency in Non-Western Migration Regimes

On January 14, 2022, we attended a dinner with Safar (the Uzbek migrant presented in Chapter 1 of this book) at O’zbegim restaurant in Kumkapi in Istanbul, Turkey. When we last met him in September 2019, he was depressed given his inability to navigate the established power geometries in Istanbul’s migrant labor market. He was planning to return to Moscow in November 2021 when his entry ban to Russia would be lifted. Much to our surprise, Safar had now become a successful migrant in Istanbul. During the course of our dinner conversation, he described the positive developments in his migrant career in Istanbul, a result of his involvement in the shadow economy and street life of Kumkapi. Frustrated with abusive shirkats and exploitative employers, in December 2019 Safar approached one of the informal Uzbek cargo companies in Kumkapi that ships garments to Uzbekistan. Since there were many cargo companies in Kumkapi, there was stiff competition among them to attract customers. This meant that the cargo company needed someone who could attract customers by distributing advertising leaflets about shipment services on the busy streets of Kumkapi. Safar’s main job was to distribute leaflets along the Kumkapi streets, find potential customers and bring them to the cargo company offices. This job required Safar to spend at least eight hours on the street and enter into communication with hundreds of people on a daily basis.

As a leaflet distributor, Safar built an extensive network and made many acquaintances from the street world and law enforcement system that subsequently paved the way for him to open a cargo company of his own, one of the most lucrative and prestigious jobs among Uzbek migrants in Istanbul. While working for a cargo company, Safar learned that not everyone can open a cargo company, even if one has enough cash to cover the initial financial costs. More importantly, one must receive a “blessing” from Kumkapi’s street world controlled by local Turks and Kurds who demand an informal fee from many businesses operating in Kumkapi. The cargo business also required one to have good connections with the zabita (municipal police), whose functions also included fighting the informal economy in public places. With the seed money he received from a local Turk, he managed to open an informal cargo company in August 2020 that later developed into a successful shipping company in the Kumkapi area. Safar also started earning income in his role as a shirkat, an informal intermediary between migrant workers and employers. Given the high turnover in the migrant labor market, working as a shirkat allowed Safar to generate an additional income alongside his cargo business earnings. Having enough income also allowed Safar to have three Uzbek wives in Istanbul through nikah (religious marriage), a widespread practice among Central Asian migrants in Istanbul and Moscow who look for temporary relationships during their migration period (Eraliev & Heusala, 2021). Now, as a successful migrant in Istanbul, Safar had abandoned his plans of returning to Moscow, since he was already well integrated into Istanbul’s migrant labor market. As Safar recounted, these positive developments in his migrant life would have been impossible had he not mastered the rules and norms within the shadow economy and street world.

How can this vignette help us explain the differences and similarities between the Russian and Turkish migration regimes? At first, Safar had little agency and did not feel “closer” to Turkey during his initial adaptation process even though the Turkish immigration regime was relatively liberal. He was nostalgic for Russia, despite having to cope with a highly punitive immigration legal regime, corrupt police officers and anti-migrant social sentiments. In his view, Russia offered him a greater sense of agency and opportunity than that available in Turkey given that he was well integrated into his village networks and possessed good knowledge of informal norms characterizing Moscow’s migrant labor market. However, after spending considerable time and mastering the informal norms within various migration arenas in Istanbul’s migrant labor market, Safar gradually adapted to and built his successful migrant career in Turkey.

This short life history brings us back to the opening arguments in the first chapter of this book, where we made a case for comparing and exploring various migration regimes through the lived experiences of migrants. We suggested a need to move beyond Western-centric approaches, which largely focus on migration outputs (migration laws and policies) as a key factor determining the quality and character of immigrant adaptation (Bloch & Schuster, 2005; Coutin, 2003; De Genova, 2004; Hallett, 2014; Menjívar, 2006). In these accounts, migrant adaptation is primarily understood in reference to the legal status of migrants, underscoring the role of the nation-state and its immigration laws as key analytical features necessary to understanding various paths, as well as the quality and timescale of immigrant adaptation. As a result, these approaches seem to aggrandize the power of immigration laws and policies as a crucial factor defining migrants’ “fate” in the host country. However, Safar’s experiences in Moscow and Istanbul as well as the many empirical examples presented in this book show that migrant adaptation is not just contingent upon migrants having the proper legal status. But, rather, in non-Western, nondemocratic migration locales such as Russia and Turkey with a weak rule of law, large shadow economies and widespread corruption, immigration policymaking and enforcement are largely shaped by informal regulatory processes in which street-level bureaucrats, employers, middlemen and migrant workers negotiate the contemporary migration system.

Accordingly, we position our book as a response to the call to move beyond the Western-centric, largely democratic, migration regime typologies (Boucher & Gest, 2015; Duvell, 2020; Gest & Boucher, 2021; Reeves, 2013; Urinboyev, 2020) by offering a comparative study of Russian and Turkish migration regimes. Our approach, however, differs from previous research in one way: our ambition in this book was not only to compare the migration outputs (immigration laws and policies) of Russia and Turkey, but we also attempted to compare these two migration regimes through the investigation of migration outcomes (what actually happens on the ground)—reading, seeing and understanding them through the daily experiences of migrants and other actors involved in multiple migration arenas. This bottom-up approach stemmed from our theoretical premise that there is no single, uncontested universal normative order within any society, but rather the outcomes of laws, regulations and policies are determined by the struggles, alliances and interplay between various social forces which take place in different social arenas. In these social arenas, rules are not clear cut and power relations remain unequal, although each actor has some degree of agency and may exert influence over the final outcome. Based on this understanding, we compared Russian and Turkish migration regimes by exploring power struggles, alliances and interactions in varying migration arenas where street-level bureaucrats, employers, intermediaries, landlords and migrant workers among others interact with one another.

Many of these processes have been illustrated in this book through the “thick description” of migrants’ experiences in multiple migration arenas in Russia and Turkey. For example, we presented our observations of migrants’ everyday lives; interviews with migrants, intermediaries, employers and street world actors; court cases surrounding deportation and entry ban issues; and life histories describing migrants’ life trajectories in Moscow and Istanbul. The use of these different datasets enabled us to explore migrants’ experiences in multiple migration arenas. But, our comparative approach had one methodological nuance. Rather than bringing in our own comparative perspective, we primarily relied on the experiences and perspectives of migrants in Moscow and Istanbul, a migrant-driven comparison that allowed us to explore and compare Russian and Turkish migration regimes through the eyes, narratives and the lived experiences of migrants. This difficult endeavor was possible given that many of our migrant informants worked both in Russia and Turkey, a unique situation that allowed them to reflect on their migration experiences in both contexts. In Chapter 3, we focused on migrants’ internal lifeworlds, agency and transnational communication practices as some of the key migration arenas in Russia and Turkey. In Istanbul, Uzbek migrants built their own ethnic enclave owing to the relatively liberal immigration regime in Turkey, while, in Moscow, Uzbek migrants primarily relied on their “digital mahalla” (smartphone-mediated communications practices) to cope with the punitive and xenophobic immigration regime in Russia. We showed how in these physical and digital arenas, migrants build their own parallel world based on its own legal order, information channels, social safety nets and networks of trust and reciprocity. In doing so, we argued that how migrants organize their transnational practices (i.e., parallel worlds) shape the outcomes of many practices migrants (and other actors) employ while in Moscow and Istanbul.

In Chapter 4, we compared the operation of Russian and Turkish migration policies and laws through an exploration of migrants’ everyday experiences with the law in Moscow and Istanbul. At first glance, Russia and Turkey represent two extremes in their approaches to undocumented migration: the former heavily relies on punitive and restrictive measures and restrictions making it nearly impossible for migrants to become “legal”, while the latter takes a relatively liberal approach to undocumented migration, tacitly allowing migrants to reside and work without any documents. One may easily conclude that Russia has more documented migrants due to its punitive approach, while Turkey has more undocumented migrants because of its laissez-faire approach. However, when viewed from migrants’ experiences, both the Russian and Turkish migration regimes, despite their divergent approaches, have arrived at similar migration outcomes: both countries have large numbers of undocumented migrants fueling their shadow economies.

In Chapter 5, we comparatively explored Uzbek migrants’ experiences of the labor markets in Russia and Turkey. Migrants frequently compared Russian and Turkish employers thusly: “Turks have faith [in Islam] but no sense of justice; Russians have no faith [in Islam] but a sense of justice”. As such, we attempted to understand how and why, despite all of the challenges associated with navigating the repressive legal landscape in Russia, many Uzbek migrants felt that Moscow offered greater agency and opportunity than Istanbul. Based on our empirical data, our central argument was that no matter how liberal or restrictive the immigration legal regime is, migrants’ life trajectories, labor market incorporation and economic success in non-Western, nondemocratic migration contexts such as Russia and Turkey all hinge upon informal regulatory practices, power dynamics, extralegal negotiations, struggles and alliances. Thus, we suggest that being undocumented and informally employed do not necessarily lead to similar migration outcomes in different migration regimes. Instead, migrants’ agency and experiences from the labor markets are contingent upon the myriad informal processes and practices determining the rules of the game within a specific migrant labor market.

In Chapter 6, we provided a comparative analysis of the shadow economy and street world in Moscow and Istanbul through the life histories of three Uzbek migrant workers. Relying upon the empirical evidence that employment under the conditions of a shadow economy has simply become part and parcel of everyday life for many migrants operating within the Russian and Turkish labor markets, we take a pragmatic approach to viewing the shadow economy neither as a friend nor as a foe (Eilat & Zinnes, 2002). Through life histories, we demonstrate how migrants as active agents employ and invent various strategies when they come into contact with multiple formal and informal legal orders in the street world. This implies that in situations and contexts where state law is inefficient or when the state is reluctant to regulate certain arenas, informal channels and practices may serve as an alternative regulatory mechanism. Hence, labeling the shadow economy and street world merely as instances of illegality and crime may preclude us from looking at migrants’ actual coping strategies and navigational skills in migration contexts permeated by the shadow economy and a weak rule of law. The key finding is that a comparison of different migration regimes should not only focus on immigration policies and law, but also encompasses the analysis of migrants’ experiences of the street world and the shadow economy as one of the key migration arenas.