Turkmenistan’s migration trap

Your paper examines a striking paradox.

A state depends very heavily on labour migration and remittances to sustain household survival and reduce pressure on the domestic economy.

And yet at the same time, it actively obstructs migration through exit bans and passport restrictions and any number of other things that we'll hopefully talk about in our conversation today.

But I wanted to begin first by asking you what it is that made you feel that Turkmenistan's migration system was a subject that required investigation.

I'm a migrant myself from Turkmenistan.

And since 2017, I have been a migrant traveling across many, many countries and meeting with my fellow countrymen and countrywomen.

And anytime I travel, talk to them or listen to their concerns not just for academia but for personal reasons it seems that their problems have not been addressed at least in comparison to other Central Asian countries so even if they have any kind of problems there is not even a social media community that can help them out so now it's developing, it's becoming more common, as you said, especially on Facebook and Instagram.

But by writing this, I'm trying to bring some attention, scholarly attention, but also think tank attention, so to speak, to the issues of migration.

Because as you said, there is a paradox and a lot of people are living Turkmenistan.

I won't go into details, not just now, about the numbers, but yes, big number, up to 30% of the Turkmen population are are now actually living abroad.

So this topic has become quite important to look at just for personal reasons, for academic reasons, and for public policy reasons as well.

Okay, so let's jump into the paper itself.

So one of the central ideas in your paper is this paradox, as I was talking about in the introduction, that the state both depends on migration and obstructs it.

So could you just give us a broad outline of that contradiction in simple terms?

So the main issue that I tried to raise in the topic is that paradox that the state does not have enough money to take care of its people in terms of social welfare.

Thus, the people inside Turkmenistan have to actually exit the country in order to work, in order to earn money, and so they can remit it so they can have a household.

The contradiction comes when the Turkmen state actually makes leaving Turkmenistan more difficult.

And after that, staying outside the country even more difficult.

I can give a few examples, if I may.

Passport controls is one of the main ones that people cannot just easily obtain international travel passports.

They need to have tourism purpose, for example, or international invitation from universities for students.

Work visas are becoming rare.

It's quite rare for a Turkmen citizen invited to work in a foreign company and he or she can easily get a visa and exit the country.

unless it's a government-offered job that a person is being sent through the government, those kind of visa restrictions make it quite difficult.

And that is the paradox I am referring to throughout the argument.