Highly Skilled Migrants from Central Asian States at the Russian Labor Market

Abstract

The article examines the features of employment in the Russian labor market of highly skilled labor migrants from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The main attention is paid to their economic activities, occupations, wages and labor intensity in comparison with similar characteristics of less skilled Central Asian labor migrants and highly skilled migrants from other post-Soviet states. It is concluded that highly skilled migrants from Central Asia, being more successful than their less skilled compatriots, lose in competition for the best jobs to highly skilled migrants from other countries. Special attention is paid to the behavior of highly skilled Central Asian migrants during the pandemic in 2020, when they demonstrated a high potential for adaptation to the extraordinary transformation of the labor market. Regarding the situation as temporary during the first wave of the pandemic (spring 2020), confident in their ability to find a job in Russia and not wanting to leave it, highly qualified Central Asian migrants did not err in their expectations, strengthening their position in the Russian labor market. During the second wave of the pandemic (autumn 2020), their optimism, based on assessing the possibilities of finding a decent job in Russia, satisfaction with conditions and wages, increased even more. The empirical base of the study was the results of sociological surveys of labor migrants from the CIS countries, Ukraine and Georgia in 2017, as well as during the first and second waves of the pandemic (2020).