Immigrants Seen Triggering Clashes Along the Volga

[unhappycamper]

http://www.jamestown.org/single/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=41973&tx_ttnews[backPid]=7&cHash=14c32a0c6add02a8ee9a20243470aa4c#.UwQhayh8vzI

Immigrants Seen Triggering Clashes Along the Volga
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 11 Issue: 31
February 18, 2014 03:54 PM Age: 8 hrs
By: Paul Goble

The influx of migrant workers from Central Asia and the South Caucasus and of workers from the North Caucasus has triggered clashes in Moscow and other Russian cities, but soon this flow appears likely to spark violence in places far from the Russian capital. According to new Russian analysis, among the first places where this is likely to occur is in the cities, Russian and non-Russian, along the Volga River.

Historian Dmitry Krivtsov says that migration flows in that region have many of the characteristics of such developments elsewhere. But he stresses that they also have their own “specific” features. Some of the cities there, like Astrakhan and Volgograd, are more affected by an influx of workers from the North Caucasus. And others, like Samara, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, are more affected by the arrival of people from Central Asia. These cities stand out in another way too: While they are attracting new workers because of their industrial base, the other cities in the region are losing populations because of the decline or even collapse of local employers. Few in the latter category are attracting any guest workers from outside the region, but some of them are seeing the arrival of businessmen from the South Caucasus. Each of these flows has its own specific impact on the situation in the region (apn.ru/publications/article31063.htm).

Krivtsov also calls attention to the way in which migration flows are making the predominantly ethnic-Russian regions of this part of the Russian Federation more Russian, with an admixture of immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia while such flows are making the non-Russian republics more non-Russian, a pattern that is recapitulating what happened at the end of the Soviet period. Russian oblasts are attracting Russians from surrounding non-Russian areas but not enough to replace the departure of Russians from them. As a result, immigrants from Central Asia are making up the difference.

The non-Russian republics in contrast are attracting their co-ethnics from beyond their borders, with “the Chuvash going to Chuvasia, the Udmurts to Udmurtia and the Bashkirs to Bashkortostan.” Such flows allow the titular nationality to preserve or even enhance its presence, Krivtsov says, and they limit but do not eliminate the influx of guest workers from Central Asia or the Caucasus.

[bemildred]

1. Cheap labor tends to get expensive in other ways. nt