Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. While migration has become an all-important topic of discussion around the globe, mainstream literature on migrants legal adaptationand integrationhas focused on case studies of immigrant communities in Western-style democracies. We know relatively little about how migrants adapt to a new legal environment in the ever-growing hybrid political regimes that are neither clearly democratic nor conventionally authoritarian. This book takes up the case of Russiaan archetypal hybrid political regime and the third largest recipients of migrants worldwideand investigates howCentral Asianmigrant workersproduce new forms ofinformalgovernance and legal order. Migrants use the opportunities provided by a weak rule-of-law and a corrupt political systemto navigate the repressive legal landscape and to negotiateusing informal channelsaccess to employment and other opportunities that are hard to obtain through the official legal framework of their host country. This lively ethnography presents new theoretical perspectives for studying immigrant legal incorporation in similar political contexts.