The massive migration of Central Asian Muslims

Blogging from Moscow this week, the local news is full of immigration issues.

The booming Russian oil economy means that Moscow now issues some 750,000 work permits a year to migrants in order to fill the city's demand for sanitation and construction workers, bus drivers and other jobs. This is in addition to the estimated 800,000 to two million illegal migrants already living and working in the city.

Many of these migrant workers come from the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia, the Muslim-majority states of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, along the old Silk Road.

Tajik and Uzbek migrants also look for work in Kazakhstan, another former Central Asian Soviet republic, but like Russia, an oil producer, which also needs migrant workers to satisfy the employment demands of its booming economy.

According to statistics quoted by the English-language Moscow Times, up to 2.5 million Uzbeks, 1 million Tajiks and 800,000 Krygyz nationals live and work legally or semi-legally in Kazakhstan.

As the Times reports, this northward labor migration "is emptying whole swaths of Central Asia of young men."

The migrant workers, not surprisingly, are often exploited by their Russian and Kazakh employers. Khadicha Abysheva, a migrant workers' rights advocate in Kazakhstan told the Moscow newspaper that some employers keep the migrants' work papers, ship them from project to project without their permission, keep them locked up in overcrowded apartments at night, and even delay paying them - essentially keeping them in a "kind of slavery."

Nevertheless, the workers continue to flow in, as even these exploitative opportunities are better than anything they can find at home.

Kazakhstan even had to erect brick "fences" to stem the flow of incoming workers coming in from Uzbekistan. As the Moscow Times reports:

. . . Until January 2003, the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan was open, with checkpoints only on major routes. But the increasing disparity between the oil-fueled Kazakh and Russian economies and the stagnating economies in the rest of Central Asia, has produced a booming smuggling businesss. . . .Local newspapers report a thriving illicit trade in smuggled farm produce and electronics originating from China.

But most of all, "smugglers here smuggle people," Abysheva said.