The coronavirus crucially impacted working and living conditions of labor migrant workers within migration corridor between Central Asian states and the Russia Federation. It remains prior destination for labor migration in this entire macro-region. According to concepts of classic migration theories, migration flows are to be primarily determined by quite clear monetary factor — differences in working opportunities and wages — between labor markets of developing countries as donor and developed countries as receiver. The formed imbalance manifesting exactly in possibility for labor migrants to send repeated remittances to relatives back home, between very diverse post-Soviet states is one of these cases. However, despite crucially increased vulnerability in sphere of finances and employment, as well as complete uncertainty concerning nearest future, among labor migrants during peak in April of the first one, but the most damaging wave of propagation of new COVID-19 epidemic in Russia and highly likely following lack of attractiveness in immigration as such, migrants did continue to opt for further work and life there. Therefore, all this calls into question concept that most important argument in favor of labor migration is very potential possibility to earn more money abroad because other aspects and/or their combination also play no less role.
Ryazantsev et al. (Tue,) studied this question.