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ABSTRACT
Legal status has shown far-reaching consequences for international migrants’ incorporation trajectories and outcomes in Western contexts. In dialogue with the extant research, we examine the implications of legal status for psychosocial well-being of Central Asian migrant women in the Russian Federation. Using survey data collected through respondent-driven sampling in two large cities, we compare migrants with regularised and irregular legal statuses on several interrelated yet distinct dimensions of psychosocial well-being. We find that, regardless of other factors, regularised status has a strong positive association with migrants’ perception of their rights and freedoms but not with their feeling of being respected in society. Regularised status is positively associated with self-efficacy and negatively with depression. Yet, no net legal status difference is found in migrants’ views on their relations with other migrants or on treatment of migrants by native-borns. The findings are situated within the cross-national scholarship on the ramifications of racialized immigrant (il)legality and its implications for membership and belonging.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
De-identified survey data are available upon request.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 We use the words ‘migrant’ and ‘immigrant’ as semantically equivalent given the increasingly blurred distinctions between temporary and permanent moves in today's transnationalized world. In Russia, from where our data come, the word ‘migrant’ is more widely used.
2 The data used in this study were collected mainly before Kyrgyzstan's entry into the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union in August 2015, which, at least nominally, offered Kyrgyz citizens greater access to the Russian labour market, compared to citizens of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
3 Alhough gender-specific migration statistics are not available from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rocheva and Varshaver (Citation2017) used data from the now dissolved Federal Migration Service to estimate that women constituted 38% of Kyrgyz citizens, 18% of Uzbek citizens, and 16% of Tajik citizens registered in Russia in the middle of the 2010s (p. 93).
4 At the exploratory stage, we experimented with different modelling strategies, including ordered logit models. The results of those models are very similar to those presented here. They are available from the authors upon request.
5 Results of the models without RDS adjustments are similar to the ones presented here and are available from the authors upon request.
6 In the satisfaction with treatment of migrants by native-borns model that does not adjust for RDS design the effect of legal status is larger and statistically significant (not shown but available upon request).