Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2021, no. 17

‘I THOUGHT COMING TO RUSSIA WAS A CRIME’: UNDOCUMENTED ECONOMIC MIGRANTS FROM GEORGIA IN THE ZONE OF LEGAL UNCERTAINTY

Evgenia Zakharova
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences
3 Universitetskaya Emb., St Petersburg, Russia
evgenics()gmail.com

Abstract: This article was written as part of an investigation of Georgian migration to Russia, primarily concentrated on ‘ethnic’ business in big cities. The author considers the question of how undocumented status and deportability affect the organisation of everyday life and the formation of the life strategies of recent economic migrants from Georgia, and also on their conditions of work and interrelations with their employers, in other words, what life in the zone of legal uncertainty is. This research question determines the formulation of the next: how migrants perceive their legal status, the level of legality in Russia, and Russia as a host country. The article also examines a natural aspect of undocumented status: the legalisation practices of Georgian economic migrants. The author comes to the conclusion that as a result of a combination of various legal incapacities Georgian economic migrants experience practically all the difficulties of ‘imposed nonexistence’: the transformation of ordinary practices, such as work or movement, into clandestine ones, limited by their physical and social mobility. Migrants perceive their position as exceptional from a legal point of view, and their undocumented status creates a sense of isolation and imposed invisibility. While life in Russia demands that migrants make efforts to maintain their invisibility to the Russian state, its presence is acutely manifested in many aspects of their everyday life.

Keywords: economic migrants, Georgia, restaurant business, legal uncertainty, undocumented status, deportability, legalisation, perception of the state.

To cite: Zakharova E., ‘“I Thought Coming to Russia Was a Crime”: Undocumented Economic Migrants from Georgia in the Zone of Legal Uncertainty’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2021, no. 17, pp. 177–206.

doi: 10.31250/1815-8927-2021-17-17-177-206

URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/eng017/zakharova.pdf