Migrant Securities: Community Obligations, Informal Care, and Everyday Security among Uzbek Migrants in Russia

Executive Summary This article examines how Uzbek migrant workers in Russia create and sustain forms of protection, care, and support under conditions of legal precarity, labor exploitation, and limited institutional trust. Drawing on longitudinal multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2026 in Moscow and Uzbekistan’s Fergana Valley, it introduces the concept of migrant securities to capture the socially embedded forms of protection migrants collectively produce through kinship ties, mahalla networks, reciprocity, emotional support, and informal care infrastructures. The study situates migrant experiences within Russia’s migration regime, characterized by strong demand for migrant labor alongside restrictive, unpredictable, and increasingly securitized migration governance. Migrants routinely confront police inspections, deportability, unstable legal status, exploitative labor conditions, overcrowded housing, and racialized discrimination. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, intensified surveillance, migration controls, and anti-migrant sentiment further deepened these vulnerabilities. The findings show that migrants actively organize alternative forms of security that operate alongside—and often compensate for—limited formal protections. Mahalla and community networks function as informal welfare systems that mobilize support during detention, illness, workplace injuries, unemployment, and housing crises. Migrants also seek recognition and legitimacy through everyday interactions with Russian neighbors, employers, and coworkers, using acts of care and assistance to secure trust, social acceptance, and practical protection. Funeral repatriation emerges as a particularly important form of collective action through which migrants ensure dignity, belonging, and social recognition beyond death. Emotional support, reciprocity, and religious belief likewise provide essential resources for coping with fear, loneliness, uncertainty, and exclusion. The article contributes to debates on migration, security, and governance by demonstrating that security is not produced solely by states and formal institutions. Rather, it is often socially generated through relationships of reciprocity, obligation, and care. At the same time, these informal systems are not substitutes for institutional protection; they frequently emerge precisely because migrants lack reliable access to labor rights, legal assistance, healthcare, and social services. The findings suggest that migration policies should complement community-based support systems by strengthening migrants’ access to legal protection, labor rights enforcement, healthcare, and emergency assistance.