Over the first nine months of this year, Tajikistan has seen a rise in cross-border seasonal migration.
Citing Tajikistan’s Migration Service, Monitoring and Early Warning in Tajikistan monthly report for October 2019 says that over the first nine months of this year, more than 411,000 people have left Tajikistan seeking better employment opportunities, which was 26 percent than in the same period last year.
Meanwhile, some 280,000 people returned to Tajikistan over the same nine-month period, 10 percent more than in January-September last year.
The increase in labor migration is due to some improvement of working conditions for labor migrants in the Russian Federation (changes were made to the agreement on labor migration and protection of rights of labor migrants) and economic growth in Russia, the report says.
Outgoing labor migration from Tajikistan has been occurring on a large scale for more than two decades, starting soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. An absolute majority of the Tajik labor migrants live and work in the Russian Federation.
As a social phenomenon this migration has a profound impact not only on the lives of the individual migrants or the families who are being supported by a family member working abroad, but also on the Tajik society as a whole and the country’s economy.
