DUSHANBE, December 18, Asia-Plus — Tajikistan has organized activities dedicated to an International Migrants, which is marked on December 18.
One of such activities is a photo exhibition formally titled “Tajikistan: World of Labor Migrant” that opened at the National Kamiliddin Behzod Museum in Dushanbe on Tuesday.
53 photographs depicting various aspects of labor migration, the life of labor migrants and their families have been put on display in the exhibition, jointly staged by the IOM mission in Tajikistan and the migration service of the Ministry of Interior (MoI) under financial support of the Government of Norway.
Sharif Usmonov, the deputy chief of the MoI migration service, said that a roundtable meeting to consider issues related to preventing illegal migration will be held at the Vefa Center in Dushanbe tomorrow. A group of Russian experts has arrived in Dushanbe to attend activities dedicated to International Migrants Day.
During their stay in Dushanbe, the Russian experts are scheduled to hold talks with representatives from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.
Labor migration plays an important role in Tajikistan’s economy, and has a strong impact on the livelihood of a large number of Tajik families and on the society at large. There are both positive and negative aspects of labor migration. Many labor migrants experience hardship on their journey to the destination country and while working abroad. On the other side they contribute to the economy in the destination country and remittances from labor migrants contribute considerably to the Tajik economy.
According to the MoI migration service, more than 500,000 Tajik labor migrants now work in the Russian Federation alone.
The IOM migration service chief Ramazan Rahimov said that a number of legal labor migrants had considerably increased after adoption by Russia of new migration legislation. “In 2006, Russia’s Federal Migration Service officially registered some 30,000 Tajik labor migrants, while this year, the number of officially registered Tajik labor migrants has reached 200,000.”
In the meantime, more than 1,850 Tajik labor migrants have been deported from Russian this year, Rahimov said. Most of them were deported for failing to register within three days of their arrival in Russia.
A meeting of the CIS experts that was held in Minsk, Belarus in early December endorsed the CIS migration policy concept aimed at regulating labor migration processes and countering illegal migration.
Jamshed Qudusov, coordinator of the Social Effects of Migration in Tajikistan” project supported by the International Labor Organization (ILO), noted that if the CIS migration policy becomes less tough in the future, the number of illegal migrants will not reduce, because the process of legalization depends not only on procedural norms of control of staying and job placement. “In addition to administrative measures there are also needed economic measures to stimulate legal job placement,” Qudusov said. Besides, it is necessary to set up service structures and create effective mechanisms of regulating a common labor market, according to him.
On December 4 2000, the UN General Assembly, taking into account the large and increasing number of migrants in the world, proclaimed December 18 International Migrants Day. On that day, in 1990, the Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.
