The Political Economy of Non-Western Migration Regimes

Front matter

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY SERIES SERIES EDITOR: TIMOTHY M. SHAW

The Political Economy of Non-Western Migration Regimes

Central Asian Migrant Workers in Russia and Turkey

Contents

Understanding Labor, Law and Informality in Non-Western Migration Regimes

Russian and Turkish Migration Regimes in a Comparative Perspective

Documentation and Legalization Arenas in Moscow and Istanbul

Index

79 113 vii

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LIST OF FIGURES

Daily life in Kumkapi - Uzbek Mahalla

Authors waiting for the arrival of Uzbek migrants (informants) at the O’zbegim restaurant in Kumkapi—one of the key hotspots for Uzbek migrants in Istanbul

Group interview with Uzbek migrants in Istanbul

Food City—Moscow’s “little Uzbekistan” where it is possible to spot a large number of Uzbek migrants Villagers meet for a plov once a month in a garage turned into a temporary accommodation. Zelenograd, Moscow province

Kumkapi—Uzbek ethnic enclave in Istanbul’s Fatih district Job and accommodation advertisements targeting Uzbek migrants

An informal prayer room in Kumkapi where Uzbek migrants pray and get religious healing services Document intermediaries in Moscow’s Kazansky railway station

Uzbek migrants are waiting in line to pay visa violation fines at Istanbul Airport

A posrednik is showing around a newly arrived Uzbek migrant his new workplace in a construction site outside Moscow

Uzbek migrants in a sweatshop in Istanbul’s Bayrampasa district ix

Chapter 1

Understanding Labor, Law and Informality in Non-Western Migration Regimes

On March 18, 2019, Safar (a pseudonym) was on an airplane heading to Istanbul in search of new adventures. The evening flight from Tashkent to Istanbul on Uzbekistan Airways took just under six hours. Viewing the glittering evening of Istanbul through the airplane window, Safar was full of excitement: the city was indeed beautiful as described in the Turkish soap operas of which he was so fond. This is where he would spend the next several years as a migrant worker, earning and sending home money.

His seven-year-long migrant life in Moscow ended abruptly in October 2018 due to an entry ban that prevented him from returning to Russia for the next three years. Two years ago, he began building a large house of his own in his home village in rural Fergana, Uzbekistan. The unexpected entry ban to Russia thwarted Safar’s plan to complete the final work on his house. After returning to Uzbekistan, Safar found it difficult to reintegrate into village life and find a decent-paying job. His quest for a stable income and the need to finish the house construction prompted him to look for new opportunities. He was not the only person in the village to receive an entry ban. Many other entry-banned villagers altered their migration routes to Kazakhstan or Turkey depending upon their connections and preferences. Safar was relieved when he learned about the successful migrant career of Botir, his fellow villager, who worked in Istanbul and encouraged Safar to try his luck in Turkey.

© The Author(s) 2022 1 R. Urinboyev and S. Eraliev, The Political Economy of Non-Western

At the Istanbul Grand Airport after passing through customs and passport control, Safar walked toward the airport forecourt, where Botir was waiting for him. Botir welcomed Safar with a smile; they shook hands and hugged each other, since they had not seen each other for five years. Botir had been working in Istanbul for almost five years by then, doing various jobs, such as sending cargo to Uzbekistan, meeting passengers from Uzbekistan at the airport and transferring them to their accommodation as well as finding jobs for other migrants for a fee. Safar paid Botir US$100 to meet him at the airport and to help with his initial settlement in Istanbul. In a way, this represented an informal adaptation service for Safar, new to the city and unable to speak the local language. In a taxi cab to the city, Botir bragged about his successful migrant career in Istanbul, earning up to US$1000 per month. However, it seemed odd to Safar that Botir did not have a car of his own if he was that successful. As an experienced migrant in Moscow, Safar knew that a migrant’s success definitively included owning a car. Regardless, Safar was happy that after several months of unemployment, he could finally get out of Uzbekistan and begin earning money in Istanbul, allowing him to support his family members and complete construction on his house.

It was already past midnight when they arrived at noisy and busy Kumkapi, a neighborhood located in Istanbul’s Fatih district. Through a dark hallway and steep stairs, Botir guided Safar to a two-room apartment filled with a dozen other men, all Uzbeks from different parts of their country. “Here you pay 15 Turkish liras [approximately US$2] per night. You can stay here until you find a shared room in another apartment,” Botir explained to Safar. The cramped room full of bunk beds and filled with the smell of sweat reminded Safar of his migrant life back in Moscow. Tired after a long journey, Safar was happy that he could finally sleep.

The next morning, he awoke to the loud sounds of the azan (the Islamic call to prayer) coming from all sides. Although not a practicing Muslim, Safar immediately felt an inner tranquility as he experienced a foretaste of the joy and freedom of fulfilling a Muslim’s task of praying. Remembering how difficult it was to practice his religion in Russia, Safar promised himself to pray in one of those grandiose mosques scattered across Istanbul, at least on Fridays. After breakfast, Safar, along with Botir and couple of his friends, began his first day by familiarizing himself with the neighborhood. While walking through the neighborhood, Safar was surprised by the presence of thousands of Uzbeks in the streets of Kumkapi. In the neighborhood, wherever he looked he saw signs of the Uzbek presence: dozens of cafés serving Uzbek food, many clothing stores and stalls selling fashions suitable to Uzbek culture, numerous cargo companies that ship clothes to Uzbekistan, Uzbek pop songs loudly playing, advertisements for accommodation and job in the Uzbek language and even nos (Uzbek snuff) sold by a local Uzbekspeaking Turk. The existence of such an “Uzbek enclave” in the middle of Istanbul was something unimaginable for Safar, who spent many years in Moscow where migrants were dispersed across different parts of the city and had to remain invisible given the repressive legal environment offering few opportunities to display their ethnic and cultural identities (Fig. 1.1).

Because Kumkapi holds the distinction as the most ethnically diverse, impoverished and crime-prone area of Istanbul, police frequently patrol the neighborhood. For Safar, who previously worked in Moscow and regularly paid bribes to Russian police officers, it was quite logical that police are corrupt everywhere and always seek reasons to “milk migrants” (i.e., extort money from migrants). Reflecting on his past experiences, Safar assumed that he would have to minimize his visibility in public places and avoid any possible encounter with Turkish police officers. Based on his Moscow experiences, during those initial days in Istanbul, he was quite anxious about police corruption and quickly hid or ran in the opposite direction whenever a police car approached, an odd behavior which surprised his fellow villagers. However, after spending a few days in Istanbul, Safar realized that Turkey had a relatively liberal legal immigration regime. Unlike life in Moscow, Safar did not need to bribe Turkish police officers and enjoyed relatively free mobility in Istanbul. Another pleasant difference from Russia was the weak enforcement of immigration and labor laws in Turkey. Thus, migrants in Istanbul could easily find work without a residence or work permit given Turkish authorities’ tacit acceptance of cheap and legally unprotected migrant labor.

However, no matter how much he enjoyed walking freely in Istanbul, Safar had to find a job as soon as possible. Botir and other migrants all suggested that Safar seek assistance from a shirkat (an intermediary), an individual who will find a job for a migrant for a fee equaling a halfmonth’s salary. Botir, himself an occasional intermediary, did not have anything to offer Safar at that time, but knew other shirkats in the neighborhood. The first job Safar found via a shirkat was in a textile sweatshop in the Bayrampaşa district of Istanbul, located in the basement

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Fig. 1.1 Daily life in Kumkapi — Uzbek Mahalla of a building which barely met the minimum standard for working conditions. In that job, Safar’s primary tasks involved ironing women’s blouses and packaging them for sale. Since he was accustomed to hard work in Russia, he did not mind working long hours in poor conditions. What disappointed him, however, was the low salary: approximately US$350 per month, working 12 hours a day with a 30-minute break, and one day off from work each week. In comparison, for this arduous schedule and work, Safar could earn as much as US$1000 a month in Moscow in the construction sector.

Unhappy with the working conditions and low pay, Safar once more cursed the day he met a Russian police officer in the Prospekt Mira metro station in Moscow. It was that officer who fined him for an expired residence registration (registratsiia), which eventually resulted in a three-year entry ban to Russia. Normally, Safar could find “common ground” with Russian police officers, who would “not notice” any deficiency in Safar’s documents for a bribe of 1000 to 2000 rubles (US$15-30). But, he was unlucky on October 27, 2018, when he was stopped by a police officer in the Prospekt Mira station for an ID check. Since Safar’s residence registration had already expired, he immediately offered money. However, the police officer refused the bribe because they were conducting a raid in order to fulfill a monthly “illegal migrant catching” quota. So, Safar was fined for failing to renew his residence registration, a fine which led to an entry ban. A month later, when Safar returned to his home village for a funeral, he was unable to buy a return airline ticket to Moscow. At the ticket sales agency, he was told that he had a three-year zapret na vezd (entry ban) to Russia, an entry ban which possibly resulted from the aforementioned fine.

Now, in Istanbul, briefly recalling all of these past events, Safar could do nothing but accept this low-paying labor-intensive job. Moreover, he learned that most of the other migrants were working in similar conditions for a similar salary. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no formal employment agreement between the Turkish patron (boss) and Safar. The patron just took photocopies of Safar’s passport and randevu (an appointment slip with an immigration office to submit the residence permit application). As the days passed, Safar learned that his patron was exploitative, often demanding him to work even faster and harder. The patron tried to squeeze every ounce of juice from his workers. Safar often remembered his work in Russia, where employers tried to comply with the minimum working conditions and paid employees for overtime work.

Close to the end of the first month of Safar’s work at the sweatshop, the patron became even more capricious and began scolding him with or without a reason, often loading him up with difficult tasks. While Safar was considering finding another job, the patron himself fired Safar for lack of diligence. Safar received only half of his salary, since the other half went to the shirkat.

It was only after holding several similar short-term jobs that Safar learned about an unofficial agreement between dishonest shirkats and employers. In this scheme, shirkats would regularly provide employers with cheap labor in exchange for half of a monthly salary. It was in the interest of the shirkat that migrants remained in a precarious situation and frequently lost their jobs. This meant every time a migrant lost her/his job, s/he was forced to turn to a shirkat to find a new position. Thus, the shirkat maintained regular communication with employers, encouraging them to fire their worker if they did not like them. This situation contrasts starkly with that in Russia, where migrants could “deploy” Chechen protection racketeers and prison-based criminal authorities against dishonest employers and intermediaries when they acted unfairly and did not satisfy oral agreements. But, in Istanbul, such street-level institutions were not available to Uzbek migrants. Each time after he was sacked from a workplace, Safar went to the shirkats with a complaint, but there was nothing he could do against the dishonest shirkats, who would blame him for his lack of zeal and flexibility in the workplace.

These exploitative practices far exceeded the hardships Safar experienced in Moscow. In Moscow, when faced with uncertainties and labor exploitation, Safar could rely on his village networks to find a job, whereas in Istanbul such village networks barely existed since Turkey has only recently become a major destination for Uzbek migrants. The lack of strong village networks rendered Safar dependent on the whims of the shirkats. He simply felt helpless in Istanbul, despite living in an “Uzbek enclave” in Kumkapi.

Safar’s case was, however, rather characteristic of the experiences of male migrants. Interestingly, Uzbek female migrants, representing approximately 75% of the Uzbek migrant population in Istanbul, occupied a better position in the Turkish labor market. This resulted from the fact that there was a high demand for female migrants in the labor-intensive sectors of the Turkish economy, such as in domestic care, textile and garment workshops, supermarkets, cleaning services, hotels and restaurants. Given this high demand, Uzbek female migrants earned more and could easily move from one job to another, while male migrants earned less and had limited employment opportunities. As a result, Uzbek female migrants occupied a higher position than male migrants and could develop strong networks and information channels in Istanbul.

These existing networks of Uzbek female migrants also provided some support to male migrants. Migrants like Safar quickly tapped into the existing female networks and received support from them when he needed help. Safar also felt women’s dominant positions in intimate relationships. There was a high need for male partners among Uzbek female migrants who sought intimate relationships. In Moscow, Safar had little chance to find Uzbek women and he had to pay for sex. But, in Istanbul, he found the opposite situation: women constituted the vast majority of the Uzbek migrant population; hence, an abundance of female migrants resulted in easy access to sex. Occasionally, Uzbek female migrants “rented” Safar and provided him with free dinner and a one-night hotel stay and, in return, he satisfied their sexual desire. Although Safar enjoyed his sexual adventures, the power relations were different this time. The fact that women initiated the intimate relationship and paid for his sexual services deeply affected his dignity and self-esteem. These experiences marked a significant change in Safar’s life and worldview about gender hierarchies, since he had to cope with these new realities and accept female dominance given his precarious situation in the Turkish labor market.

Safar’s experiences recounted above refined many of our pre-fieldwork assumptions that Uzbek migrants would feel “closer” to Turkey for a host of linguistic, cultural, religious and legal reasons. Instead, his case demonstrated that no matter how liberal the immigration legal regime is, migrants’ life trajectories and success in non-Western, nondemocratic migration contexts such as Russia and Turkey hinge upon other micro-level informal rules, kinship networks, gender roles, modes of incorporation into the labor market and the importance of a shared sense of understanding of “the rules of the game” under the conditions of informal employment. Despite the existence of draconian immigration laws and a border control infrastructure, combined with ever-increasing antimigrant sentiments within Russian society, Safar was nostalgic for his Russian experiences and planned to return to Russia as soon as his entry ban expired. The primary puzzle that Safar’s story generated was how and why, despite its highly punitive environment, Russia seemed to offer a greater sense of agency and opportunity than that available in Turkey.

At the same time, Safar’s story demonstrated that his experiences were gender-specific and that Istanbul offered more agency and opportunities to female migrants than their male counterparts. Consequently, these comparisons, narrated through Safar’s experiences, illustrate not just that Istanbul and Moscow provide striking differences and similarities in terms of the migrant experience, moral assessment and legal adaptation, but also shed light on the interconnections between migrant agency, gender, informality and networks of trust and solidarity in non-Western migration locales.

Safar’s case also raised numerous theoretical and empirical questions pertaining to the study and conceptualization of contemporary migration regimes still confined to the North American and Western European migration contexts. His case shows that attempts to compare different migration regimes should extend beyond the mere analysis of migration policies and laws. That is, we should also consider the role of micro- and meso-level struggles, alliances and interactions that take place in different migration arenas, such as migrants’ internal lifeworlds and social networks, migrant labor market, documentation and legalization practices and shadow economy and street institutions. This implies that we need to place more emphasis on migrants’ agency and experiences in these multiple arenas as a lens for comparison. The investigation of migrants’ agency and experiences in these arenas enables us to understand how migration governance takes place on the ground, a study of which provides a more comparative perspective of varying migration regimes. In this regard, the following anecdote provided by Safar demonstrates that it is insufficient to focus on migration policies and laws; we also need to consider informal and extralegal processes that shape migration outcomes:

Once, three Uzbeks, childhood friends, met in Uzbekistan in a café for a reunion. Through fate, all three recently experienced migration: to the United States, to Turkey and to Russia, respectively. After several drinks, they all started boasting about their migration experiences in their host countries.

Amirbek (the migrant who worked in the US) arrogantly stated that his migrant life in America was very good: “America is really a land of opportunities. You have everything there; all your human rights are respected. Laws work there and you don’t have to pay bribes. Employers cannot exploit you and you receive extra pay if you work overtime. Even though I was on an expired tourist visa and was fully illegal, I had no problem finding a good job. I earned a lot of money, up to US$5000 a month, which was enough to buy a new car every month if I wanted to. But once I was caught by the police, they deported me from America to our beloved Uzbekistan, where I am now unemployed. Unfortunately, I cannot go back there anymore.”

Timur (the migrant who worked in Turkey) laughed sarcastically and said that America is nothing compared to Turkey, where the immigration system does not care much about illegal migrants. He said that “I did not earn that much — about US$400 a month. Laws don’t work in Turkey. Employers exploit you like a slave. But, the good thing is that I lived and worked there without a residence or work permit. Police didn’t bother me with ID checks. I could walk in any part of Istanbul freely. When I left Turkey last month, I just paid a fine at the airport. Because I paid that fine, I can return to Turkey tomorrow and find a job the next day.”

When it was Ramat’s (the migrant who worked in Russia) turn to talk about his experience, he modestly said that he earned up to US$800 per month. He added that “in Russia laws don’t work, human rights do not exist and the police and immigration are not nice. But, still, Russia is a land of opportunities. You can make a lot of money and be successful if you are good at bending laws and giving bribes or providing favors. Everything is possible in Russia if you have money. If you are caught by the police, you can pay a bribe and they let you go. If your employer is exploiting you or not paying your salary, you can use the street racketeers to solve problems. You can also fix immigration problems with money. For example, I got an entry ban, but I can bribe immigration officials or border guards and return to Russia.”

These stories left Amirbek and Timur (migrants who worked in the US and Turkey) wondering how it was possible to have so much leverage and to navigate in such a repressive and corrupt country like Russia.

This anecdote offers intriguing insights into the three different worlds of migration regimes, where migrants experienced contrasting working conditions and varying levels of immigration law enforcement. On the one hand, it shows that nondemocratic regimes such as Turkey and Russia are more open to migrants because they tacitly accept undocumented migration, ignore migrants’ rights and deny access to the social protection system, which produces a cheap, legally unprotected and deportable migrant labor force. On the other hand, it illustrates that liberal democracies such as the US are not easily accessible to migrants; however, once accessed, migrants enjoy more rights and better conditions. This anecdote also shows the divergence in immigration law enforcement among three migration regimes, indicating that migrants enjoy greater agency to negotiate and bend immigration laws in nondemocratic states given opaque legal systems and ubiquitous corruption. Consequently, the anecdote presented above and Safar’s experiences suggest that we need to go beyond the traditional approaches in comparative migration studies that largely focus on the comparison of migration policies and laws across various migration regimes. Rather, we might arrive at different findings when we try to understand and compare various migration regimes through the lived experiences of migrants. This bottom-up approach enables us to see the other side of the coin, that is, how migration policies and laws are perceived, experienced and renegotiated in the daily lives of migrant workers. These points thus lead to the following questions: Can existing migration regime frameworks, which are largely based on Western-centric approaches, be applied to the context of nondemocratic migration regimes? How can we account for the differences in state-society relations, legal cultures and governance patterns when comparing different migration regimes? And, how does the focus on migrants’ agency and experiences as a lens for comparison help us understand, compare and reconceptualize contemporary migration regimes? These represent the guiding questions reflected in this book.

THE RATIONALE

This book is conceived as a critical reflection on contemporary migration regime scholarship, and, more generally, on comparative migration studies. Here, we aim to critically engage with and contribute to the following fields of research.

First, an extensive literature on immigration regimes exists, although this literature remains largely based on the study of migrants’ experiences and immigration policies in the context of Western liberal democracies in North America, Western Europe and Australia. A growing body of literature argues for the necessity of advancing existing theories in migration studies beyond Western-centric perspectives (Boucher & Gest, 2015; Breunig et al., 2012; Diivell, 2020; Gest & Boucher, 2021; Mirilovic, 2010; Natter, 2018; Urinboyev, 2020). Given the predominant research focus on migration processes in Western liberal democracies, major non- Western migration destinations elsewhere in the world remain underrepresented by existing theories within migration studies—including those top migrant-receiving countries such as Brazil, China, the Gulf states, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia and Turkey (Boucher & Gest, 2015; Natter,

1 UNDERSTANDING LABOR, LAW ... ll

2018). According to the World Migration Report (IOM, 2019), 12 of the 20 top destinations for international migrants in 2019 consisted of countries not belonging to the traditional western countries of North America, Western Europe and Australia. As editors of the International Migration Review (a leading journal in migration studies) admit, 80% of articles published in the journal since 2016 geographically focus on North America or Western Europe. This uneven geographic coverage is explained by the limited attention granted to migration dynamics beyond North America and Western Europe. “It also highlights the challenges that scholars writing about the wider geography of international migration face in attempts to situate their work in relation to hegemonic perspectives about two global regions” (IOM, 2019, p. 138). As Reeves (2013) maintains, this lacuna can be explained in part by the ongoing legacies of the “three-worlds division” of social-scientific labor (Chari & Verdery, 2009; Pletsch, 1981), which tend to focus on global South- North migrations, whereas migration processes in non-Western contexts remain underrepresented in comparative and theoretical debates about contemporary migration regimes. Consequently, without a comparative and comprehensive analysis of a large diversity of migration countries, we run the risk of relying on approaches and theoretical frameworks with limited applicability to non-Western migration contexts.

A second component to our rationale is that the dominant literature on contemporary migration regime typologies primarily focuses on Western-style democracies (Boucher & Gest, 2015; Diivell, 2020; Gest & Boucher, 2021). Addressing this gap is particularly important when considering the fact that many new migration hubs are nondemocratic, which in turn requires us to revise or produce new frameworks of analysis beyond existing migration regime typologies. In Western-style democracies, as Sassen (1996) and Joppke (1998) argue, the state’s arbitrary power and penchant to curtail migrant rights are significantly constrained by the international human rights regime, independent national courts and an active civil society. Unlike Western-style democracies, nondemocratic (and non-Western) immigrant-receiving countries are often characterized by autocratic regimes, poor human rights records, a weak rule-of-law and arbitrary law enforcement, systemic corruption, a large shadow economy and poorly organized civil societies and labor unions (Breunig et al., 2012; Mirilovic, 2010; Natter, 2018; Urinboyev, 2020). This implies that autocracies are less constrained than liberal democracies in terms of respecting and upholding the human rights of citizens

(including those of migrants) and ignoring a population’s antimigrant sentiments, leverage which enables autocratic regimes to adopt more liberal immigration policies (Breunig et al., 2012). Given these differences, we cannot assume that frameworks constructed in the context of (Western) liberal democracies apply within the context of nondemocratic migration contexts.

Third, we also need to consider the variations within and across nondemocratic regimes when exploring the interconnections between regime type and immigration policymaking. The literature focusing on the interconnections between regime type and immigration policymaking continues to focus on the differences in immigration policymaking between democracies and autocracies (Boucher & Gest, 2015; Mirilovic, 2010), whereas relatively little attention has been devoted to the variations and similarities in immigration policymaking within and across authoritarian regimes (with the notable exceptions of Adamson & Tsourapas, 2020; Natter, 2018). An analysis of the comparative politicalregimes literature demonstrates the rapid proliferation of political regimes that no longer fit within conventional classifications of democracy and authoritarianism (Diamond, 2002; Levitsky & Way, 2010). Different terms and names have been proposed to conceptualize these regimes: hybrid political regimes, competitive authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism, partially liberalized regimes, semidemocracy, pseudodemocracy, illiberal democracy, semi-authoritarianism, soft authoritarianism, defective democracy or Freedom House’s “partly free” (Carothers, 2002; Diamond, 2002; Schedler, 2015; Zakaria, 1997). Thus, the immigration regime classifications and theories should reckon with the significant differences among nondemocratic regimes, which necessitates new approaches and tools. This implies that rather than merely juxtaposing democracies and autocracies as “two different worlds of immigration regimes,” it might also be useful to comparatively explore how immigration policymaking and enforcement vary within nondemocratic regimes.

Fourth, existing immigration regime typologies, as Boucher and Gest (2015) have rightly pointed out, often do not sufficiently clarify their indicators of comparison or characterize entire immigration regimes when examining some of their features. Other studies focus on specific dimensions such as labor migration, citizenship or integration outcomes or compare migration policies and laws, yet fail to place them within the broader perspective or framework of migration regime types. In other words, existing typologies suffer from unsystematic comparative analyses that insufficiently explain the rationale behind the aggregation of various features of immigration regimes (ibid.). As a result, the consolidation of complex and divergent migration policies and laws into broader migration regime typologies may obscure the important internal differences among countries rather than facilitate comparative empirical investigation (Finotelli & Michalowski, 2012). This task is especially challenging in the context of nondemocratic migration contexts, where a discrepancy exists between formal migration policies and laws (“law in books”) and their actual implementation (law in action), a gap which makes it difficult to construct the “building blocks” of a typology (Collier et al., 2012). In this respect, when comparing different migration regimes, we need to account for informal processes, practices and migrants’ agency that affect the outcomes of immigration policymaking.

AIMS AND INTENDED CONTRIBUTIONS

Based on the above considerations, the central aim of this book is to contribute novel empirical and theoretical insights to scholarly debates on contemporary migration regimes and, more broadly, to comparative migration studies. In undertaking this task, we rely on a multisited transnational ethnographic study of Uzbek migrant workers in Russia, Turkey and Uzbekistan, conducted between January 2014 and January 2022. Drawing from our rich ethnographic data, we attempt to contribute to the literature in the following five distinct ways.

First, we respond to Boucher and Gest’s call, proposed in their paper “Migration studies at a crossroads: A critique of immigration regime typologies” (2015), to move beyond the Western-centric, largely democratic, migration regime typologies. This task is accomplished by presenting ethnographic material on Uzbek migrants’ everyday experiences in Moscow, Russia and Istanbul, Turkey. We focus on Russia and Turkey because they are archetypal non-Western, nondemocratic contexts as well as key international migration hotspots (UNPD, 2020). Yet, both Russia and Turkey remain underrepresented in comparative and theoretical debates on contemporary migration regimes (Diivell, 2020; Reeves, 2013; Urinboyev, 2020). Therefore, analyzing these two non-Western migration regimes is of huge importance given our need to address the uneven geographic coverage in the study of migration regimes, whereby current studies are limited to the analysis of migration regimes in North America and Western Europe (IOM, 2019, p. 138). Our ambition is thus to provide novel empirical material, a comparative perspective and methodological tools capable of informing efforts to construct approaches and theoretical frameworks for the study of non-Western migration regimes.