‘Everything is better’ Why a growing number of migrant workers from Uzbekistan are choosing Poland over Russia
Nearly a year has passed since The Beet first reported on Russia’s not-so-covert effort to enlist Central Asian migrants to fight in Ukraine. Since then, the situation for migrant workers in Russia has only grown more precarious, especially in the aftermath of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in March. After arresting four Tajik citizens as the prime suspects, the Russian authorities launched a renewed clampdown on migrants, deporting nearly 40,000 foreign nationals for allegedly breaking migration laws so far this year. State Duma lawmakers, meanwhile, have adopted legislation that tightens controls over migrants inside Russia, facilitates deportations, and strips away the citizenship of naturalized Russian citizens who fail to register for military service. With the Russian market also losing its economic appeal, some Central Asian workers have started to look for opportunities elsewhere. For The Beet, journalist Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska reports on why a growing number of migrant workers from Uzbekistan are choosing Poland.
This story first appeared in The Beet, a weekly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Sign up here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox.
Abror Khusanov didn’t realize his new job would be so hard. A month earlier, he had quit a well-paid position at a logistics company in his hometown of Tashkent and moved to Poland. It was his first time setting foot in a European country.
On his first day, Khusanov woke up at 1:00 a.m. to prepare for his shift, getting in line for one of the two bathrooms he shared with a dozen others. At 2:00 a.m., a bus took him and the other migrant workers to a meatpacking plant in a remote area near Bydgoszcz, a mid-sized city in northern Poland.
Inside the factory, the workers were divided between different stations. One could either cut up the chickens — chop off their heads, remove the giblets — or sort their parts: legs with legs, wings with wings, breasts with breasts. A lucky few got the “clean job” of stacking and moving boxes of chicken scraps or sorted cuts of meat. “The smell was unbearable,” Khusanov told The Beet. “It was dirty work.”
Many of the other workers at the plant were from Uzbekistan, too. According to the Uzbek embassy in Warsaw, there are currently around 20,000 Uzbek students and labor migrants in Poland, and this number is growing steadily. The number of Polish national identification numbers (PESEL) and residency permits issued to Uzbek citizens over the past few years also suggest a rapid influx. According to data The Beet received from Poland’s Digital Affairs Ministry, more than 21,000 Uzbek nationals have been granted PESEL numbers since 2014. And while only 50 Uzbeks received them in 2016, this number increased to 6,440 in 2023.
The Polish Foreign Ministry has also granted more than 27,000 visas to Uzbek citizens since 2019, and close to 10,000 Uzbeks currently hold valid residency permits, the Office for Foreigners told The Beet.
Many Uzbekistanis use intermediary companies offering work visas to foreign nationals willing to relocate to Poland, whose fast-growing economy has long faced labor shortages. The number of vacancies has only increased since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Hundreds of draft-age Ukrainian men returned home to join the war effort and were then forbidden from leaving the country due to martial law. Western European labor markets also opened up to Ukrainians, leading seasonal workers who previously came to Poland to take higher-paying jobs elsewhere.
Khusanov paid $400 for his Polish work permit. But by the end of his first 12-hour shift at the meatpacking plant, he was done. The 26-year-old called his coordinator and said he couldn’t continue with the job. The company didn’t hold it against him and allowed him to leave. The next day, he packed his suitcase and traveled all the way to Szczecin, a city in northwestern Poland, to stay with friends.
Soon after, Khusanov joined thousands of his compatriots and registered with a popular food delivery service. A few months later, he got a job at a Ukrainian print shop. “My dream was to live in Europe, get to know European culture, travel, and learn foreign languages,” he said. “Uzbeks say you need to get married as soon as possible, have children. As time goes by, you need to buy a house. It was difficult for me to live with this pressure, and I didn’t want all that. Here, people don’t care what you do.”
‘Poland is safer’
Traditionally, Uzbeks looking for work abroad chose Russia as their destination. Since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Uzbekistan has maintained close ties with the former metropole, and the Russian language remains widely spoken in Uzbekistan, particularly in the capital, Tashkent.
Officially, more than one million Uzbek citizens live and work in Russia, though this number fluctuates due to seasonal labor migration. With a total of around two million Uzbeks working abroad, remittances play an important role in Uzbekistan’s economy, equaling about 21 percent of the country’s GDP in 2022.
However, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine caused a crack in the long-established migration cycle. The depreciation of the ruble due to international sanctions affected the value of the remittances Uzbek migrants sent back home, while growing inflation caused migrants to spend a bigger portion of their salaries on their expenses in Russia.
“Migrants no longer choose Russia as a long-term destination,” explained Temur Umarov, a Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center fellow. “Previously, around 1.5 million migrants from Central Asia would stay in Russia for more than nine months in a year, which means they saw Russia as a place where they could move to, relocate their families, [and] get passports. Now, [fewer] people do.”
“However, for short-term migration — three months or so a year — people still tend to choose Russia,” he added.
However, Russia has become less predictable for temporary workers, too, and it’s become much harder to determine how many months they need to work to save enough money to build a house or organize a wedding.
Following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, 130,000 Uzbeks returned home temporarily, provoking fears among officials of the risks associated with a rise in unemployment and, in turn, poverty. That same year, Uzbekistan’s Institute of Forecasting and Macroeconomic Research determined that Poland, along with several other European countries, was among the most attractive prospective destinations for labor migrants from Uzbekistan.
On migration and discrimination in Putin’s Russia:
“For Uzbekistan, migration is not only an economic problem, but also a political one. Imagine a reality where hundreds of thousands of migrants, the majority of whom are young men, return home and have no jobs or resources to feed their families. This is a potential source of instability,” Umarov told The Beet. “[Uzbek President Shavkat] Mirziyoyev cannot control Russia. But he can agree with other countries to take in a portion of these migrants and provide them with jobs. It goes in line with the efforts of all Central Asian countries to diversify their ties with the world and lower their dependency on Russia.”
Uzbekistan’s Agency for External Labor Migration, a branch of the Employment Ministry tasked with securing work contracts for Uzbek citizens abroad, claims to have sent 70,000 people to work in developed countries through bilateral agreements since 2022. It also announced the creation of a labor migration attaché post at Uzbek consulates in the United Kingdom, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Japan. As BBC Uzbek reported, the share of remittances from Russia fell from 87 percent to 78 percent in 2023 and then dropped to 68 percent in the first quarter of 2024, according to Uzbekistan’s Central Bank.
The economy isn’t the only reason Uzbeks have been increasingly reluctant to travel to Russia for work. Reports of Russian police intimidating Central Asian migrants into signing army contracts to fight in Ukraine, problems with securing work permits, and discrimination against migrant workers, which has only increased following the deadly terrorist attack in Moscow in March, have all affected migrants’ willingness to stay in Russia.
Nasir Akhparov, a 37-year-old from Namangan, has no desire to return to Moscow, where he lived from 2010 to 2019. He chooses his words carefully and hesitates to complain, preferring to focus on his experience living in Poland. “Poland is safer, and I earn better money than in Russia. Everything is better. In Moscow, you can’t really go out at night,” he said over a plate of Uzbek plov at Mumtaz, an Uzbek restaurant in central Warsaw. “Here, nobody will beat you up. In Russia, [these] things happened. It was hard. Russian men and the police attack migrants. They ask who you are, why you’re here.”
‘A new place to build our life’
Akhparov moved to Poland in 2021 and has never regretted this decision. His employer pays for the apartment he shares with two other Uzbeks in Warsaw’s Wola district, so he can save much of his salary. He even managed to buy himself a car, a Toyota with his name on the plates — something he never could have afforded in Russia.
In Poland, Akhparov said, he can listen to Uzbek music while driving his taxi and customers don’t complain. (Sherali Joʻrayev, the celebrated Uzbek singer who passed away last September, is his favorite.) “Polish police are totally different from Russian ones,” he added. “They have respect, they speak nicely, they don’t arrest people for no reason. They don’t stop you randomly. In Russia, they do — and they take bribes. Here, I’ve never given one.”
While it’s much more difficult to obtain a work permit in Poland than in Russia, many of Akhparov’s friends have also decided to move to Warsaw, mostly for financial reasons: Moscow has become expensive, and the ruble is weak, he said.
Mumtaz is a busy spot and Akhparov seemed to know many of the mostly Uzbek clients who passed through the restaurant. It’s one of many Uzbek eateries that have opened in Warsaw in recent years to meet the increasing demand from migrant workers who miss the flavors of their homeland.
According to Wahid Mukhedinov, it was hard to find Uzbek food in Warsaw just a few years ago; hardly any of his compatriots lived here. The entrepreneur moved to Warsaw in 2015 after he fell in love with the city during a trip with his wife. “At the time, we were looking for a new place to build our life,” the Namangan-native told The Beet. “When we saw Warsaw, [with] its impressive skyline, we decided to stay.”
Earlier this year, Mukhedinov founded an association for Uzbek entrepreneurs to assist the growing number of migrants who have set up businesses in Poland and facilitate cooperation between the two countries. “There are a lot of Uzbeks who are now integrating into Polish society, and they need help in the form of associations, various services, legal and logistical assistance,” he said.
Akhparov is also looking to put down roots. The only problem with his “fairytale” life in Poland, he said, is that his family is so far away. When he visited his wife and three children (ages eight, four, and three) in Namangan last April, he hugged his youngest son for the first time; his wife was pregnant when they last saw each other. Akhparov now plans to bring the whole family to Warsaw. “I would like for them to join me here in Poland,” he said.
“There’s a growing number of Uzbek shops in Poland, and Uzbek goods have become available; there’s even an Uzbek halal butcher,” Mukhedinov told The Beet. “The emergence of an Uzbek quarter [in Warsaw], a Central Asian Chinatown, is only a matter of time.”
Hello, I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of The Beet. Thanks for taking the time to read our work! Our newsletter delivers underreported stories like this one to subscribers every Thursday. Like all of Meduza’s reporting, it’s free to read, but relies on support from readers like you. Please consider donating to our crowdfunding campaign.
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Story by Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska for The Beet
Edited by Eilish Hart