Bhavna Dave

Keeping labour mobility informal: the lack of legality of Central Asian migrants in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstans legal–regulatory framework provides for a small number of quotas for highly skilled foreign workers but has no provisions for legal employment of semi-skilled or low-skilled migrants from the Central Asian states, who enter under the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) visa-free regime and work informally in construction, household and service sectors. The lack of acknowledgement of the scale of informal labour migration has denoted an act of strategic neglect on the part of the state, allowing it to render migrant labour illegal, disposable, and keep migrants legally and statistically invisible. Unable to obtain a legal status, migrants nominally comply with the existing legal framework as they also circumvent and subvert it. The article details the entrenched informal regime of labour migration and explains why recent efforts to ‘legalize’ labour through the introduction of a labour patent (licence), as is the case in Russia, are unlikely to bring in significant reforms.

Management of Ethnic Relations in Kazakhstan: Stability without Success

The resilience and survival of multinational states, in the long run, are contingent upon the ability of the institutional mechanisms of the state to accommodate ethnic and cultural diversity and create a shared public culture.1 The availability of legal and institutional safeguards for both individual and group-based rights and the presence of civil society are indispensable in maintaining the effective functioning of multiethnic states and crediting them with legitimacy.