Economic Incorporation, Civil Inclusion, and Social Ties: Plans to Return Home among Central Asian Migrant Women in Moscow, Russia

Abstract

This study uses data from a survey of female labor migrants from three Central Asian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – in Moscow, Russia, to examine factors that influence these women's plans to return to their home countries. The conceptual framework considers three types of factors of migrants’ attachment to the host society – economic incorporation, civil inclusion, and social connectedness – while also accounting for migrants’ ties to their homelands. The results of multivariate analyses point to the importance of sector and type of employment, income, legal status, experience of ethnically motivated harassment, and social ties to adults relatives and friends in the host society in shaping return plans. In contrast, connections in the home country do not appear to influence the likelihood of having plans to return. These findings are contextualized within the political, socioeconomic, and ethnocultural reality of the post-Soviet world and related to the cross-national scholarship on return migration.