2 Rethinking migrant integration through legal informality

Migration scholarship has long conceptualised migrant integration through frameworks emphasising citizenship, institutional incorporation, legal status and participation in the institutions of receiving societies (Ager and Strang Reference Ager and Strang2008; Alba and Nee Reference Alba and Nee2009; Haas et al. Reference De Haas, Castles and Miller2019; Joppke Reference Joppke2007; Penninx and Garcés-Mascareñas Reference Penninx, Garcés-Mascareñas, Garcés-Mascareñas and Penninx2016). Within this literature, integration is generally understood as migrants’ gradual incorporation into the social, economic, political and legal domains of receiving societies. Legal status consequently becomes a key determinant of migrants’ life chances, shaping access to employment, housing, education, health care and political participation. Studies of migrant adaptation have similarly demonstrated how immigration laws structure everyday life by producing categories of inclusion and exclusion that profoundly affect migrants’ life chances (Coutin Reference Coutin2003; Gleeson Reference Gleeson2010; Menjívar Reference Menjívar2006; Menjívar and Abrego Reference Menjívar and Abrego2012).

Closely related scholarship has shown that migrant illegality is not a natural condition but a legal and political construct produced through immigration regimes themselves (Calavita Reference Calavita1998; De Genova Reference De Genova2002; Goldring et al. Reference Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard2009; Kubal Reference Kubal2013). States create differentiated legal categories that grant or restrict access to rights, resources and mobility, producing a spectrum of statuses ranging from documented and undocumented to liminal, semi-legal and quasi-legal positions. In this sense, immigration law functions not merely as a regulatory framework but also as a mechanism of social stratification (Ngai Reference Ngai2014). As De Genova (Reference De Genova2002) argues, migrant illegality often operates as a mode of governance that incorporates migrants into labour markets while simultaneously maintaining their vulnerability.

This scholarship has substantially complicated binary distinctions between legality and illegality. Yet an additional question concerns how migrants themselves learn to navigate such complex legal environments over time. Socio-legal research has demonstrated that formal law interacts with informal practices, social relations and everyday understandings of legality (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Merry Reference Merry1988; Tamanaha Reference Tamanaha2000), while migration research has emphasised migrants’ capacity to negotiate, challenge and creatively respond to legal constraints (Coutin Reference Coutin2003; Hagan Reference Hagan1994; Sigona Reference Sigona2012). Building on these insights, this article focuses specifically on the relationship between legal knowledge, adaptation and incorporation: how repeated encounters with law generate practical knowledge and how migrants use, revise and share this knowledge to remain socially and economically embedded despite persistent legal insecurity.

The Russian case provides a particularly revealing setting for examining this process. Migrants operate within a socio-legal environment characterised by legal ambiguity, selective enforcement, corruption, discretionary authority and extensive reliance on informal mechanisms of mediation (Schenk Reference Schenk2018; Urinboyev Reference Urinboyev2020). Under such conditions, formal legal status alone provides only a partial explanation for migrant incorporation. The co-existence of deep economic and social embeddedness with continuing legal precarity creates an analytical puzzle: migrants may become increasingly experienced and competent in navigating the legal environment without necessarily moving towards more secure legal status.

Understanding migrant incorporation in Russia therefore requires situating migration governance within broader traditions of post-Soviet legal culture. Scholars of post-Soviet societies have long demonstrated that formal institutions frequently operate through informal networks, personal connections and negotiated practices. Ledeneva’s (Reference Ledeneva2006) work on blat and informal governance shows how unofficial exchanges and personal relationships function alongside formal institutions rather than outside them. Ledeneva (Reference Ledeneva1998), Gel’man (Reference Gel’man2016) and Polese (Reference Polese2016) similarly demonstrate that legal and political life often unfolds through personalised authority, selective enforcement, negotiated interpretation and practical understandings of how institutions actually function in everyday reality.

These broader socio-legal dynamics profoundly shape migration governance in Russia. While migration law appears highly bureaucratic and restrictive on paper, its implementation frequently depends on discretionary enforcement, corruption, informal payments, legal brokerage and personal connections (Reeves Reference Reeves2013; Schenk Reference Schenk2018; Urinboyev Reference Urinboyev2020). Migrants often describe this reality through phrases such as ‘everything depends on connections’ (hammasi svyazga bog‘liq) or ‘the law can be bent if you have the right connections’ (agar kuchli tanish bo‘lsa, qonunni chetlab o‘tish mumkin). Such statements reflect not simply perceptions of corruption but practical recognition that legal outcomes are often shaped as much by relationships, intermediaries and negotiations as by formal regulations. Russian migration governance therefore cannot be understood solely through legal texts or official policies. Its everyday functioning depends on interactions among police officers, migration officials, employers, document brokers, lawyers, labour intermediaries and migrants themselves. Formal legality and informal practice remain deeply intertwined.

Building on these insights, this article introduces the concept of shadow legal integration. The term ‘legal’ does not imply that all practices involved are formally lawful; rather, it identifies the legal order as the domain in which migrants acquire practical navigational competence. Shadow legal integration highlights three interconnected dynamics. First, legal status may be categorical on paper while its practical consequences are mediated through discretionary and informal practices. Second, the concept foregrounds migrant agency by emphasising migrants’ capacity to acquire, test, revise and transmit practical legal knowledge within uncertain legal environments. Undocumentedness or legal precarity does not automatically eliminate agency; it may encourage migrants to develop alternative strategies that allow them to circumvent or mitigate legal constraints (Donato and Armenta Reference Donato and Armenta2011; Garcés-Mascareñas Reference Garcés-Mascareñas2010; Urinboyev and Polese Reference Urinboyev and Polese2016). Third, the concept highlights the infrastructural character of incorporation. Migrants’ adaptation depends not only on state institutions but also on dense networks linking employers, lawyers, brokers, officials, co-ethnic communities and digital communication systems. Integration therefore emerges through broader socio-legal infrastructures that extend beyond formal institutions. Shadow legal integration thus contributes to existing scholarship on migration and informality by identifying not simply the existence of informal practices, but the process through which migrants learn to navigate them and thereby acquire practical competence within the legal order.

This perspective also requires rethinking deportability. While migrants frequently live under conditions of legal uncertainty shaped by police raids, registration inspections, detention facilities, migration courts and deportation databases, deportability itself often remains negotiable. Deportation orders may be appealed, bypassed, erased from databases or circumvented through informal arrangements and personal networks. The Russian migration regime thus combines intense deportability with legal ambiguity, selective enforcement and negotiable exclusion. Migrants remain vulnerable to removal while simultaneously developing practical strategies capable of mitigating, circumventing or reworking state controls. Shadow legal integration emerges precisely within this tension.

The Russian case therefore illustrates a broader analytical possibility: social and economic incorporation can co-exist with persistent legal insecurity. Migrants may become increasingly knowledgeable about and capable of navigating a legal order without necessarily becoming more securely legal within it. In contexts characterised by discretionary enforcement and extensive informality, legality itself is socially embedded and negotiated (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Merry Reference Merry1988; Tamanaha Reference Tamanaha2000). Migrants integrate not simply through changes in formal status, but also by learning how the legal order operates in practice. Shadow legal integration therefore provides a framework for understanding this process of practical incorporation in socio-legal environments where formal rules and informal practices are interconnected dimensions of governance.

3 Methodology

This article draws on longitudinal multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2026 among Uzbek migrant workers in Russia and their left-behind families and communities in Uzbekistan. Fieldwork was conducted through repeated research visits to Moscow and the Fergana Valley over this twelve-year period, complemented by sustained digital ethnography and ongoing communication with migrant networks between periods of in-person fieldwork. The research remains ongoing. The research examines how migrants navigate legality, informality, labour precarity and everyday survival within Russia’s migration regime. Over more than a decade, the research traced migrants across multiple social and institutional settings, including workplaces, migrant dormitories, migration centres, police stations, courts, detention facilities, digital communication platforms and transnational village networks linking Moscow with the Fergana Valley.

Methodologically, the study combines multisited ethnography, legal ethnography, longitudinal fieldwork, digital ethnography and narrative interviewing. While the broader project initially focused on migrant livelihoods, labour arrangements and adaptation strategies, migrants’ encounters with migration controls, deportation systems, legal institutions and informal mechanisms of survival emerged as central themes. Questions of legality permeated nearly every aspect of migrant life, shaping access to employment, housing, mobility, health care and family survival. Over time, it became clear that formal legal status alone could not explain how migrants lived and worked in Russia. Ethnographic observation instead revealed dense infrastructures of informal adaptation involving legal brokers, intermediaries, employers, lawyers, corrupt officials, counterfeit documents and personalised networks of protection. The longitudinal design also made it possible to observe how migrants acquired, tested, revised and shared practical legal knowledge through repeated encounters with these actors and institutions. The concept of shadow legal integration emerged inductively through long-term engagement with these socio-legal worlds.

The research employed a multisited approach to capture migration as a transnational process unfolding across interconnected social and institutional environments. Most fieldwork was conducted in Moscow and the surrounding region, including districts with large Central Asian migrant populations such as Lyublino, Kotelniki, Khimki and Krasnogorsk. Fieldwork focused on construction sites, renovation projects, migrant dormitories, overcrowded apartments, informal labour markets, transportation hubs and migrant neighbourhoods. Participant observation involved accompanying migrants during everyday routines, including commuting to workplaces, negotiating wages, renewing migration documents, interacting with employers and intermediaries and navigating encounters with police and migration officials.

Several institutional sites were particularly important. Fieldwork at the Moscow Multifunctional Migration Center (MMC) in Sakharovo provided insight into biometric registration procedures, patent acquisition, medical testing, fingerprinting and digital forms of migration governance. Legal ethnographic research also followed migrants’ interactions with district courts, police stations and pre-deportation detention facilities. Detailed interviews reconstructed migrants’ legal trajectories through arrests, inspections, court proceedings, deportation orders, appeals and negotiations with officials or intermediaries, offering valuable insight into how migrants experience state power, bureaucratic arbitrariness and negotiated legality in practice. Repeated encounters with some participants further enabled comparison between migrants’ initial responses to legal problems and the strategies they developed through accumulated experience.

Research was also conducted in the Fergana Valley, particularly in villages and mahallas (local neighbourhoods) around Oltiariq with long histories of labour migration. Interviews in Uzbekistan provided access to experiences and practices that migrants often hesitated to discuss in Russia, including deportation, corruption, document fraud and informal legal strategies. The transnational fieldwork further demonstrated that many migration strategies were organised across borders. Family networks, village connections, intermediaries and local brokers frequently assisted migrants in obtaining passports, raising money, arranging travel, contesting deportation orders or establishing contacts within Russian migration institutions.

The study draws on extensive participant observation and more than 100 formal and informal interviews conducted in Uzbek and Russian. Many interviews unfolded over multiple encounters and focused on life histories, migration trajectories, deportation experiences, legal disputes and practical legal knowledge. Migrants often described interactions with police officers, judges, migration officials, lawyers and brokers in remarkable detail, allowing reconstruction of both formal procedures and the informal negotiations surrounding them. Repeated interviews were particularly useful for tracing how practical legal knowledge changed over time and distinguishing accumulated learning from one-off or accidental responses to legal problems. The research also incorporated analysis of migration documents, registrations, work permits, court decisions, deportation orders, appeals, detention records and administrative protocols. These materials were approached not merely as bureaucratic artefacts but as socially embedded documents circulating through wider infrastructures of informality and negotiation.

Digital ethnography became increasingly important throughout the research period, particularly after 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic) and during the wartime period following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Uzbek migrants relied heavily on Telegram, WhatsApp and other digital platforms for labour recruitment, migration advice, document procurement, legal information, police warnings and transnational communication. Systematic observation of online groups, migrant media channels and smartphone communication practices provided insight into how information about migration rules, deportation risks, police inspections and legal adaptation circulated across transnational networks. These digital networks were particularly important for tracing how practical legal knowledge was collectively shared and updated as migration regulations and enforcement practices changed.

Researching deportation, corruption, document fraud and informal legal practices raised significant ethical challenges. Many participants occupied legally precarious positions and faced potential risks involving deportation, surveillance, labour retaliation or administrative sanctions. All names used in this article are pseudonyms, and identifying details have been altered where necessary. Long-term trust-building proved essential, as discussions of sensitive topics typically emerged gradually through repeated interactions rather than during initial encounters. The wartime period after 2022 introduced additional concerns related to digital surveillance, anti-migrant policing and political sensitivities, leading some participants to avoid recordings or discuss certain issues only offline. The research was conducted under the project ‘MIGRANT LAW RUSSIA – Migration, Shadow Economy and Parallel Legal Orders in Russia’, based at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, and funded by the European Commission through a Horizon 2020/Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (MSCA-IF).

The aim of the research was not to classify migrants according to formal legal categories but to understand ethnographically how legality operates in everyday life under conditions of hybrid governance. Through long-term immersion across multiple sites, the study reveals migrant incorporation as a dynamic process unfolding through continuous negotiations among formal law, informal practices, state institutions and everyday strategies of survival. The longitudinal approach is especially important to the argument because it allows shadow legal integration to be examined as a process of learning and adaptation over time rather than simply as migrants’ use of informal solutions to individual legal problems.

4 Deportability and bureaucratic violence in migrant Moscow

On the evening of 25 October 2024, Shavkat returned to the overcrowded Moscow apartment where he lived with other Uzbek migrant workers. Like many migrant dwellings across the city, it functioned as a rezinovaya kvartira (‘rubber apartment’), a crowded living space where migrants resided under precarious registration arrangements. Earlier that day, residents noticed police officers and migration officials moving around the building, and rumours quickly spread that migration authorities were conducting inspections following complaints from Russian neighbours. Shortly afterwards, police officers and immigration officials entered the apartment demanding documents. Although most residents possessed valid work permits, their registrations were linked to different addresses – a common situation among migrants because obtaining registration at one’s actual residence was often prohibitively expensive or practically impossible. The discrepancy nevertheless became grounds for detention. Shavkat and thirteen other migrants were taken to a police station, fingerprinted, pressured to sign documents they could not read and processed through deportation proceedings. While Shavkat eventually overturned the deportation order with assistance from a migrant-rights lawyer, another migrant, Ali, was deported to Uzbekistan and formally banned from re-entering Russia for five years. Yet within months Ali had returned to Moscow through networks connecting him to an intermediary with close ties to an employee working inside the migration bureaucracy. According to Ali’s account, the intermediary arranged for his entry ban (zapret) to be temporarily suspended within the migration database. After obtaining a new passport in Uzbekistan, Ali re-entered Russia during this brief window before the restriction was reinstated.

A key site in this process is the rubber apartment. Such apartments emerged not merely because migrants preferred collective living arrangements but because Russian migration regulations made full compliance difficult for low-wage workers. Many migrants possessed some combination of valid work permits, temporary papers, purchased registrations or partially expired documents. Even migrants with legally issued work patents frequently violated registration requirements because landlords refused formal registration, demanded additional payments or sought to avoid scrutiny themselves. As a result, migrants often purchased registrations tied to addresses where they did not actually live. This contradiction generated widespread structural illegality. Migrants frequently appeared ‘illegal’ not because they lacked documents altogether but because legal requirements were difficult to satisfy under everyday housing and labour conditions. Rubber apartments therefore became spaces where legality and illegality continuously overlapped.

Police raids on such apartments served as visible performances of migration control while simultaneously reproducing the informal arrangements on which the migration system depended. As Shavkat recalled, ‘The moment they entered, we already understood: everybody would become illegal no matter what documents we had.’ His observation captures an important feature of the Russian migration regime: legality functions less as a stable status than as a fragile and reversible condition vulnerable to reinterpretation by state authorities. At the same time, his statement reflects knowledge accumulated through previous encounters and information circulating within migrant networks about how such inspections typically unfolded.

Migrants frequently described immigration inspections as unpredictable, humiliating and highly discretionary. Although formal regulations existed, officials often exercised considerable latitude in determining whether irregularities would result in an informal payment, a fine, detention or deportation proceedings. Shavkat explained that under ordinary circumstances such situations could often be resolved through informal payments, but in this case the involvement of senior officials following neighbourhood complaints altered the outcome. Migration enforcement thus depended not solely on law itself but also on shifting configurations of visibility, political pressure, corruption opportunities and bureaucratic discretion. For migrants, police raids became moments of profound uncertainty in which it was rarely clear which documents mattered, whether penalties were negotiable or how detention would unfold. Repeated encounters nevertheless enabled migrants to develop practical understandings of these variations and to adjust their responses accordingly. Uncertainty itself became a mechanism of governance.

Following detention, Shavkat and the other migrants spent several days in police holding cells awaiting court proceedings. Their accounts reveal forms of bureaucratic violence operating through administrative procedures rather than overt physical brutality. Migrants described overcrowded cells, inadequate food, sleep deprivation, psychological pressure and prolonged uncertainty regarding legal outcomes. Particularly striking were repeated accounts of forced signatures on documents that migrants were unable to read or understand. Some reported signing blank forms, untranslated protocols or administrative records whose contents remained unknown to them. In these cases, bureaucratic procedure itself functioned as a mechanism of coercion. While formally legal, such practices effectively excluded migrants from meaningful participation in the processes governing their lives.

Fingerprinting constituted another important dimension of this administrative violence. Although migrants were detained for migration violations rather than criminal offences, many described fingerprinting as a form of symbolic criminalisation. As Ali explained, ‘They took fingerprints immediately, put us behind bars, removed phones and watches. From that moment you feel no longer like worker but criminal.’ Migration enforcement thus blurred distinctions between administrative regulation, policing and penal governance. Migrants moved through detention cells, courtrooms and deportation facilities in ways that closely resembled criminal punishment despite having committed administrative infractions.

The deportation hearings themselves further exposed the opacity of migration governance. Shavkat and Ali both described court proceedings as confusing, rapid and difficult to understand. Migrants often lacked translators, legal representation or meaningful explanations of procedures. Some reported being transported repeatedly between police stations and courts without understanding whether hearings had even taken place. Courts formally embodied legal rationality and due process, yet many migrants experienced them as inaccessible bureaucratic rituals governed by hidden decisions and procedural ambiguity.

Perhaps most revealing was the inconsistency of legal outcomes. Migrants detained during the same raid for nearly identical registration violations often received markedly different penalties. While Ali and his father were deported, others received administrative fines or were allowed to leave voluntarily. Similar infractions produced different consequences depending on bureaucratic discretion, institutional pressures, available resources and access to intermediaries. Such variability illustrates a broader feature of Russian migration governance: although migrants are formally regulated through registrations, patents, databases and administrative courts, legal outcomes are frequently shaped by selective enforcement, bureaucratic opacity and informal mediation. Deportability therefore functions less as a fixed legal category than as a condition of permanent uncertainty within a fragmented and unevenly enforced migration regime.

Shavkat’s successful appeal illustrates the negotiability of legality within this system. Assisted by a migrant-rights lawyer, he challenged procedural violations committed during detention, including the absence of translation, forced signatures and detention beyond legal time limits. The appeal court ultimately overturned the deportation order, not because the registration violation disappeared but because procedural irregularities undermined the legitimacy of enforcement. The case demonstrates that legal outcomes often depend on access to intermediaries capable of navigating the system strategically. Yet such opportunities remain unevenly distributed, as most migrants lack access to legal expertise, translators or advocacy organisations. Shavkat’s experience also illustrates legal learning: through the detention and appeal process, he acquired practical knowledge about procedural rights, the significance of translation and documentation and the possibilities of challenging administrative decisions.

Ali’s trajectory reveals an even more striking dimension of negotiated legality. Despite being formally deported and banned from Russia for five years, he returned within months through a combination of personal networks, informal brokerage and alleged manipulation of migration databases. Whether every detail of Ali’s account can be independently verified is less important than what it reveals about migrants’ perceptions of legality and state authority. For many migrants, deportation was understood not as a final act of exclusion but as a potentially negotiable restriction that could, under certain circumstances, be suspended, circumvented or reworked through intermediaries, personal networks and informal access to bureaucratic infrastructures. Ali’s response was therefore not simply an informal solution to a legal problem; it drew on practical knowledge about intermediaries, documents, databases and border procedures accumulated and circulated through migrant networks.

This does not mean that deportability is inconsequential. Deportation remains materially and emotionally devastating, disrupting livelihoods, mobility, family life and economic security. Yet migrants repeatedly described deportations, entry bans, registrations and legal restrictions as conditions that could sometimes be negotiated, appealed, postponed or circumvented. Deportability therefore functions not simply through actual removal but through permanent uncertainty regarding legal status and future mobility.

This uncertainty shapes housing decisions, labour arrangements, mobility patterns, interactions with police and emotional well-being. Migrants gradually learn to navigate it through practical strategies: carrying reserve money for encounters with police, memorising legal terminology, relying on intermediaries, maintaining multiple documents and cultivating personal connections. Such practices constitute forms of practical legal knowledge developed through experience, observation and information exchange. They do not eliminate legal precarity but can increase migrants’ capacity to navigate it. Deportability thus becomes not merely a mechanism of exclusion but a mode of incorporation into precarious systems of selective enforcement and negotiated legality.

Ultimately, the Russian migration regime operates through a hybrid form of governance that combines bureaucratic formalism, administrative opacity, discretionary enforcement, corruption and informal mediation (Reeves Reference Reeves2013; Urinboyev Reference Urinboyev2020). Migrants encounter state power through registrations, databases, fingerprints, detention facilities, courtrooms and deportation orders. Yet these same institutions remain fragmented, internally contradictory and continuously shaped by informal practices. Within this environment, shadow legal integration does not mean achieving secure legal status. It describes migrants’ growing practical competence in navigating the interaction between formal rules, discretionary enforcement and informal mediation. Migrants remain permanently vulnerable while simultaneously learning the practical grammars of the legal order necessary for survival and incorporation within Russian urban life.

5 Learning informality: migrants’ practical legal knowledge

One evening in a migrant dormitory outside Moscow, several Uzbek construction workers discussed a newly arrived migrant from the Fergana Valley who had recently been detained during a police inspection near a metro station. According to the older workers, his mistake was not a lack of documents but a lack of practical knowledge. When stopped by police, he attempted to explain his legal situation honestly and relied entirely on formal documentation. After hearing the story, one experienced migrant summarised the lesson succinctly: ‘Rossiyada qonunni bilish yetmaydi, sistemani bilish kerak’ (‘In Russia it is not enough to know the law; you must know the system’).

This distinction between ‘law’ and ‘the system’ captures a central dimension of migrant adaptation in Russia. Over time, migrants develop practical legal knowledge about how legality actually functions within a socio-legal environment characterised by discretionary enforcement, corruption, legal ambiguity and negotiated authority. Migrants learn not only formal migration regulations but also whom to approach, where to negotiate, when to remain invisible, how to interact with police, which documents matter most and through whom bureaucratic obstacles can be resolved. This practical knowledge becomes a critical resource for survival and incorporation. Shadow legal integration develops through this process of acquiring, testing, revising and sharing practical legal knowledge. In many cases, successful adaptation depends less on perfect legal compliance than on the ability to navigate the informalised structures through which governance operates in practice.

Newly arrived migrants often enter Russia believing that obtaining official work permits and registrations will guarantee legal security. Everyday experience quickly undermines this assumption. Older migrants frequently described newcomers as sodda (‘naive’) because they interpreted legal rules too literally. Through workplace conversations, police encounters, immigration raids and labour disputes, migrants gradually learn that legality depends not only on documents but also on practical knowledge of how institutions function. As one migrant explained, ‘At first migrants think documents protect them. Later they understand documents alone solve nothing. You must know people and know where problems can be solved.’ The contrast between newcomers and experienced migrants demonstrates that such practices are not simply improvised responses to individual problems but forms of knowledge accumulated through experience.

This learning process occurs collectively. Construction brigades, dormitories, workplaces and migrant networks function as informal schools where migrants exchange information about police behaviour, migration raids, registration procedures, legal loopholes, document brokers and bureaucratic practices. Knowledge is therefore continually transmitted, tested against experience and revised when particular strategies succeed or fail. Rather than viewing law as a stable institutional order, migrants often describe legality as flexible, negotiable and dependent on circumstance. Such perceptions should not simply be dismissed as evidence of ‘corruption culture’. Rather, they reflect practical adaptation to a governance system in which formal regulations remain deeply intertwined with discretionary enforcement and informal negotiation (Gel’man Reference Gel’man2004; Ledeneva Reference Ledeneva1998).

Interactions with police officers constitute one of the most important arenas through which migrants acquire this practical legal knowledge. Virtually every migrant interviewed described repeated document inspections in metro stations, market-places, train stations, streets or construction sites. These encounters rarely followed purely legal scripts. Instead, they often became negotiated interactions in which legality, money and survival intersected. Migrants learned basic tactical principles: remain calm, speak respectfully, avoid confrontation, carry reserve cash and assess whether negotiation is possible. Over time, they developed sophisticated understandings of different categories of officers, identifying which units posed greater risks and which were more interested in informal payments. They also learned how policing patterns varied across districts, holidays, political events and anti-migrant campaigns.

Importantly, migrants emphasised that not every situation could be resolved through bribery. Practical legal knowledge involved understanding when informal negotiation was possible and when institutional visibility, media attention or political pressure limited such options. As Shavkat recalled after his detention, ‘If ordinary officers came, probably everything could be solved quietly.’ Migrants thus learned to interpret legal encounters not as uniform bureaucratic procedures but as situational events shaped by context, hierarchy and discretion. Such judgments distinguish learned adaptation from simply making guesses that happen to produce favourable outcomes.

Registration systems represented another important arena of informal learning. Russian migration law formally requires migrants to register at their place of residence, yet compliance often proves difficult because landlords refuse registration, demand additional payments or seek to avoid scrutiny themselves. As a result, many migrants participate in shadow registration markets involving fictitious addresses and intermediary services. Most did not view such practices as inherently criminal. Rather, they described them as necessary adaptations to contradictory institutional realities. As one migrant explained, ‘The law says one thing, but life works differently.’

Migrants therefore learned how to combine formal and informal legality strategically. Some maintained valid work permits while purchasing registrations linked to addresses where they never lived. Others changed registrations depending on employment opportunities or perceived policing risks. Practical legal knowledge involved understanding which documents were ‘good enough’, how databases operated, which papers police examined most carefully and which forms of documentation could successfully withstand routine inspections. Legality, in this sense, functioned pragmatically rather than absolutely.

Migration brokers played a crucial role in these processes. Brokers mediated access to registrations, work permits, legal advice, transportation, appeals and sometimes even the removal of deportation records. Migrants frequently described brokers as people who ‘understand the system’. Their value often lay not in providing illegal services but in helping migrants navigate bureaucratic complexity. Brokers knew which offices processed documents efficiently, how paperwork should be prepared and which procedures could be accelerated through personal connections. At the same time, brokers occupied deeply ambivalent positions. Migrants relied heavily on them while simultaneously distrusting them because fraud, overcharging and false promises were common. Practical legal knowledge therefore also involved learning which intermediaries were trustworthy and which legal shortcuts carried excessive risk.

Many migrants operated through forms of tactical compliance rather than choosing between complete legality and outright illegality. They occupied hybrid positions that were partially documented, selectively compliant and strategically adaptable. Work permits were often prioritised because they reduced risks during inspections even when other documents remained irregular. As one migrant observed, ‘You do not need perfect documents. You need documents good enough for everyday life.’ This notion of ‘good enough legality’ reflects adaptation to a system in which full compliance is often economically unrealistic and enforcement remains selective.

The same logic extended to broader forms of informal adaptation. Migrants described purchasing registrations, using borrowed documents, altering passport spellings, obtaining counterfeit medical certificates or relying on intermediaries to address deportation-related problems. Ali’s case illustrates this dynamic. Following deportation, he obtained a new passport and re-entered Russia through informal connections that allegedly enabled the temporary suspension of his entry ban. From the perspective of formal law, such actions violated migration regulations. From the perspective of migrants, however, they often represented necessary strategies for maintaining livelihoods and supporting families.

The widespread circulation of documents through shadow markets further reinforced this practical legal culture. Around places such as Kazansky Vokzal, entire infrastructures emerged around registrations, migration cards, work permits, medical certificates, insurance papers and even passports. Migrants developed sophisticated knowledge about document quality and bureaucratic functionality, distinguishing between ineffective forgeries and documents that could successfully pass routine inspections. Practical legal knowledge therefore extended beyond knowledge of regulations to include familiarity with the bureaucratic aesthetics and informal infrastructures through which legality was produced and recognised.

The central insight emerging from these ethnographic materials is that knowledge of informality functions as a crucial integration resource within contemporary Russia. Migrants who acquired practical knowledge of how to negotiate with officials, navigate document markets, assess risks, mobilise intermediaries and manage visibility were better equipped to sustain their economic and social embeddedness despite legal insecurity. This did not eliminate vulnerability. Migrants remained exposed to deportation, extortion, fraud, police violence and bureaucratic arbitrariness. Rather, practical legal knowledge increased migrants’ capacity to navigate such vulnerability without necessarily making their legal status more secure. This is the central paradox captured by shadow legal integration.

The Russian migration regime thus produces a paradoxical situation in which formal legality remains unstable while practical legal adaptation becomes essential for survival. Migrants integrate not simply by complying with the law but by learning how legality actually operates within a system shaped by discretionary enforcement, negotiated authority and hybrid governance. Shadow legal integration describes the cumulative outcome of this learning process: migrants become increasingly competent in navigating the legal order while potentially remaining formally precarious within it. In this context, knowledge of informality becomes an important practical resource that enables migrants to work, circulate and remain embedded within Russian urban life despite conditions of permanent legal uncertainty.

6 Shadow legal integration in practice

The preceding sections argued that migrant incorporation in Russia frequently depends on practical mastery of hybrid legal environments characterised by selective enforcement, informality and negotiated governance. This section illustrates how shadow legal integration operates through deportation appeals, database manipulation, patronage protection and the acquisition of Russian citizenship documents. Together, these cases demonstrate different ways in which migrants mobilise accumulated legal knowledge, intermediaries and social networks to navigate legal insecurity. Shadow legal integration therefore does not constitute a single strategy but a learned capacity to identify and mobilise available pathways within a fragmented legal environment.

Shavkat’s deportation case demonstrates how migrants may strategically navigate formal legal institutions through intermediaries and procedural knowledge. After being detained during a raid on a rubber apartment, Shavkat received a deportation order based on registration violations. Through a colleague, however, he contacted a lawyer affiliated with a migrant-rights organisation who identified multiple procedural irregularities, including prolonged detention, forced signatures, lack of translation and denial of legal explanation. Rather than disputing the registration discrepancy itself, the appeal focused on procedural violations committed by police and migration authorities. Following the lawyer’s advice, Shavkat requested an Uzbek translator and answered all questions in Uzbek, making irregularities in the administrative process more visible. The court eventually overturned the deportation order, ruling that procedural violations undermined the legality of enforcement.

This case highlights several important dynamics. First, Russian migration governance remains internally fragmented rather than institutionally coherent. Police officers, migration officials, detention authorities and judges often operate according to overlapping but contradictory logics. Second, Shavkat’s trajectory demonstrates how practical legal knowledge can be acquired and mobilised through intermediaries. His lawyer translated procedural complexity into knowledge that Shavkat could use strategically within the formal legal system. Finally, rights discourse functioned less as a universally protected norm than as a tactical resource selectively mobilised to challenge migration enforcement. Yet such opportunities remained unevenly distributed. Most migrants lacked access to lawyers, translators or advocacy organisations, making formal legality was accessible in practice only through infrastructures of mediation.

If Shavkat’s case illustrates adaptation through formal procedural knowledge, Ali’s trajectory reveals a different pathway based on informal and networked knowledge. Following deportation from Russia, Ali returned to Uzbekistan with a five-year entry ban. Unlike Shavkat, he did not pursue a legal appeal. Instead, he relied on migrant networks linking Uzbekistan and Russia. Through fellow migrants from the Fergana Valley, he was introduced to an intermediary with connections to an employee inside the migration bureaucracy. According to Ali, the intermediary arranged for his entry ban to be temporarily suspended in the migration database. After obtaining a new passport in Uzbekistan, he re-entered Russia during this brief window before the restriction was reinstated.

The case demonstrates that migration databases do not operate independently of the social relations surrounding their implementation. Although digital systems are often imagined as rationalised and centralised, their operation remains embedded in social relationships and may be subject to informal intervention. Deportation appeared not as an irreversible act of sovereign exclusion but as a restriction that could sometimes be negotiated through personal networks, money and informal access to bureaucratic infrastructures. Ali’s reintegration further illustrates the transnational character of shadow legal integration, relying on village networks, intermediaries, passport offices and migration infrastructures spanning Russia and Central Asia. Stories about deportation removal, altered identities and database manipulation circulated widely among migrants and became part of their collective practical legal knowledge.

Another dimension of shadow legal integration emerged through patronage networks and selective protection. Alisher’s experience illustrates how informal protection could alter migrants’ exposure to migration enforcement. Between 2018 and 2024, he worked at a luxury dacha in Moscow Oblast owned by a wealthy Russian businessman allegedly connected to the Federal Security Service (FSB). According to Alisher, the employer repeatedly assured workers that migration documents were unnecessary because his institutional connections would protect them. For nearly a year, migrants reportedly worked without serious legal difficulties despite lacking proper documentation.

The situation changed when Alisher and several co-workers were detained during an immigration raid near Kazansky Vokzal. Deportation procedures began immediately, but the employer intervened personally. Following discussions with migration officials, deportation measures were reportedly softened, passports returned and detention avoided. The episode illustrates how access to patronage networks can alter migrants’ exposure to enforcement. Such experiences also become part of migrants’ practical understanding of how formal legal status interacts with social position and access to influential intermediaries. State power therefore simultaneously produces and mitigates migrant illegality, leaving migrants differently exposed to enforcement depending partly on their position within networks of influence.

Perhaps the most striking form of shadow legal integration involved migrants’ acquisition of Russian passports – whether genuine, semi-legal or counterfeit – as technologies of legal and social transformation. During fieldwork, migrants frequently used the term chorniy (‘black’) to describe how Central Asians were racialised within Russian society. The label signified not merely ethnicity but broader associations with foreignness, illegality, low-status labour and vulnerability to police scrutiny. By contrast, Russian citizenship functioned as a marker of legitimacy, mobility and protection.

Migrants repeatedly explained that possessing a Russian passport transformed everyday interactions with employers, landlords, police officers and bureaucratic institutions. As one migrant observed, ‘With an Uzbek passport you are always a migrant. With a Russian passport you become a normal person.’ Others noted that police behaviour changed immediately once Russian documents were presented. Citizenship therefore operated not merely as a legal status but as a practical resource affecting migrants’ exposure to scrutiny and their access to employment and mobility. Access to Russian passports – sometimes through intermediaries specialising in document procurement – enabled migrants to avoid repeated document inspections, obtain better jobs, negotiate higher wages and circulate more safely through Moscow.

These practices reveal what many migrant interviewees described as ‘becoming white through documents’: the strategic transformation of legal and racial visibility through citizenship documents that symbolically reclassify Central Asian migrants from racialised outsiders into legitimate and less suspect members of Russian society. Russian citizenship functioned simultaneously as legal status, labour-market infrastructure, mobility technology and shield against discrimination. Its power often extended beyond formal rights to encompass embodied recognition and differential exposure to state scrutiny. This also demonstrates that shadow legal integration does not replace formal legal status: migrants learn to mobilise both formal and informal resources, depending on their circumstances.

Accordingly, these cases reveal different pathways through which practical legal knowledge becomes legal adaptation. Shavkat learned to mobilise procedural rights through legal expertise; Ali relied on collectively circulated knowledge and informal brokerage; Alisher experienced the protective capacity of patronage; and other migrants learned the practical advantages associated with citizenship documents. Importantly, these practices do not exist outside state structures. Rather, they emerge through continuous interaction with the fragmented institutions of migration governance themselves. Shadow legal integration names the cumulative process through which migrants acquire and mobilise such knowledge and relationships, becoming more capable of navigating the legal order without necessarily becoming more legally secure within it.

7 Informality as integration infrastructure

As shown in previous sections, informality functions not simply as a symptom of institutional weakness but as a key infrastructure through which migrant integration is organised. Many migrants discussed in this article possess unstable documentation, irregular legal status, counterfeit registrations and precarious relationships with state institutions. Many experience detention, deportation or repeated police harassment. Yet ethnographically, these same migrants are often deeply embedded in Russian economic and social life: they maintain long-term employment, participate in urban economies, support transnational households, navigate bureaucratic systems and develop sophisticated practical knowledge of how the migration regime functions. This apparent contradiction demonstrates that social and economic incorporation can co-exist with persistent legal insecurity. Shadow legal integration captures this relationship by directing attention to how migrants become increasingly competent in navigating a legal environment without necessarily becoming more securely legal within it.

The central finding is therefore not simply that legality in Russia is informal or negotiated, but that migrants learn how to navigate the interaction between formal and informal systems over time. State institutions, police discretion, migration brokers, employers, intermediaries, patronage networks and shadow economies together shape the environment within which this learning occurs. Migrants repeatedly emphasised that successful adaptation depends less on perfect legal compliance than on understanding ‘how the system works’. Such practical knowledge includes knowing which documents matter most, how police behave, which intermediaries can be trusted, how to manage bureaucratic encounters and when visibility becomes risky. As this knowledge is accumulated, tested and shared, it becomes a resource for maintaining economic and social incorporation under conditions of legal precarity.

This dynamic reflects broader traditions of post-Soviet governance characterised by legal pluralism, discretionary authority, institutional fragmentation and personalised power. Formal institutions remain important, but their practical functioning is deeply intertwined with informal negotiation and social mediation (Morris and Polese Reference Morris and Polese2015). Even migrants possessing valid documents may face police extortion, arbitrary detention, labour exploitation or bureaucratic harassment (Kubal Reference Kubal2016). Conversely, migrants with irregular documentation but strong informal networks often achieve relatively stable economic incorporation through intermediaries, patronage relations, negotiated protection or strategic invisibility (Urinboyev Reference Urinboyev2020). Shadow legal integration therefore does not replace formal legality or describe successful integration in a normative sense. Rather, it identifies a process of adaptation through which practical legal knowledge can facilitate incorporation while legal precarity persists.

8 Relearning the system: shadow legal integration after 2022

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 profoundly transformed the social, political and legal environment surrounding migrant life. Although Uzbek and other Central Asian migrants had long navigated bureaucratic precarity, selective enforcement and racialised policing, the wartime period intensified these dynamics through increasing securitisation, digitalisation, militarisation and state surveillance (Memorial Human Rights Defence Center 2025). Many return migrants we interviewed in Uzbekistan repeatedly described a sense that ‘everything became stricter’: police raids intensified, document inspections became more frequent, biometric monitoring expanded, anti-migrant rhetoric increased and fears of deportation, surveillance and military recruitment spread throughout migrant communities. For the argument developed here, these changes are important because they disrupted established practical knowledge and required migrants to learn and adapt again. Shadow legal integration is therefore not knowledge acquired once and for all, but a continuous process of recalibration as legal rules, enforcement practices and risks change.

One of the most visible wartime transformations was the intensification of migration policing. Migrants reported more frequent raids on construction sites, dormitories, markets, delivery hubs and transportation nodes, particularly in migrant-dense areas around Kazansky Vokzal. Many interpreted these operations not simply as migration control but as broader security measures linked to wartime anxieties surrounding terrorism, nationalism and internal stability. As one migrant observed, ‘Before police mainly wanted money. After the war, sometimes they behave like migrants are an enemy population.’ Central Asian migrants increasingly felt treated as potentially dangerous or suspicious populations regardless of their legal status. At the same time, anti-migrant rhetoric became more visible in public discourse and social media, even as Russia’s wartime economy remained heavily dependent on migrant labour in construction, logistics, delivery services and other low-wage sectors. Previously learned strategies for navigating police encounters therefore did not always work in the same way, requiring migrants to reassess when negotiation was possible and when avoidance was safer. Recent independent research also documents increased raids, ethnic profiling, arbitrary arrests and restrictions affecting Central Asian migrants, particularly following the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack (Human Rights Watch 2025).

Another major transformation involved the rapid expansion of biometric governance and digital surveillance. Migrants increasingly described the migration system as ‘fully digital’ and ‘connected everywhere’. Biometric registration through fingerprinting, facial recognition, digital databases and smartphone verification became central components of migration governance, particularly at the Sakharovo Migration Center. Many migrants perceived these systems as creating permanent visibility and traceability. As Ikrom explained, ‘Before you could disappear inside Moscow. Now everything enters the computer immediately.’ Fears extended beyond migration offices to geolocation tracking, SIM-card registration, facial-recognition cameras and interconnected databases linking migration authorities, police and security institutions. These developments altered migrants’ practical calculations about visibility, documentation and interactions with state institutions. Recent legal changes have also expanded authorities’ ability to use technologies including geolocation and facial recognition in monitoring some foreign nationals.Footnote ¹

Yet digital governance did not replace informality. Migrants continued discussing database manipulation, broker-mediated legalisation, registration schemes and counterfeit digital records. New surveillance technologies were layered on to existing systems of negotiated legality rather than replacing them. Indeed, greater digital control often increased demand for intermediaries capable of navigating increasingly complex bureaucratic systems. Shadow legal integration consequently required migrants and intermediaries to update practical knowledge in response to new technologies of control.

Wartime uncertainty also generated fears surrounding military recruitment and mobilisation. Although Uzbek citizens without Russian citizenship are not ordinarily subject to Russian military conscription, reports of migrant recruitment and citizenship-for-service schemes produced widespread anxiety. Many migrants avoided official institutions, military offices and unnecessary interactions with authorities out of concern that digital records could connect them to recruitment systems. Naturalised Russian citizens of Central Asian origin faced a different legal position, and reports also documented pressure on Central Asian migrants to sign military contracts (Human Rights Watch 2025). These fears coincided with broader economic uncertainty. Across interviews conducted with return migrants in Uzbekistan after February 2022, respondents repeatedly expressed feelings of fear, exhaustion, uncertainty and unpredictability regarding their future mobility, employment prospects and legal status in Russia. As one migrant remarked, ‘Nobody understands what tomorrow will look like anymore.’

The wartime period also intensified deportability. Migrants increasingly feared arbitrary detention, database errors, registration invalidation and accelerated deportation procedures. Many observed that police officers had become less willing to negotiate informally because of heightened institutional scrutiny and political pressure. At the same time, deportability became increasingly digitised through biometric registration systems and centralised databases. Yet enforcement remained selective and uneven. Migrants continued purchasing registrations, relying on intermediaries, manipulating records, changing identities and mobilising personal networks. The important analytical point is that migrants had to revise rather than simply reproduce previously learned strategies. Biometric systems generated demand for knowledgeable brokers; intensified policing increased reliance on digital warning networks; and surveillance fears encouraged strategies of tactical invisibility.

One particularly important development was the growing role of migrant digital communication networks. Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups and other online platforms became essential infrastructures for sharing information about police raids, document inspections, legal changes, military recruitment rumours and dangerous locations. Migrants routinely exchanged photographs of police vehicles, locations of document checks and warnings about enforcement operations. These digital networks functioned as decentralised systems of mutual aid and information exchange, allowing migrants to respond quickly to changing enforcement patterns. They also accelerated collective legal learning: information about new rules and enforcement practices could be circulated, evaluated and updated across migrant networks.

Ultimately, the wartime period demonstrates the adaptive and dynamic character of shadow legal integration. As migration governance became more securitised, biometric, militarised and digitally intensive, migrants had to revise existing knowledge and develop new strategies involving intermediaries, tactical compliance, document brokers, digital warning systems and practical legal knowledge. The post-2022 period therefore shows that shadow legal integration is not a stable repertoire of informal practices. It is an ongoing process of learning and adaptation through which migrants recalibrate their strategies as the legal and enforcement environment changes. Migrants may consequently become highly knowledgeable about navigating the migration regime while remaining persistently vulnerable within it.