ABSTRACT

Legal status has shown far-reaching consequences for international migrants’ incorporation trajectories and outcomes in Western contexts. In dialogue with the extant research, we examine the implications of legal status for psychosocial well-being of Central Asian migrant women in the Russian Federation. Using survey data collected through respondent-driven sampling in two large cities, we compare migrants with regularised and irregular legal statuses on several interrelated yet distinct dimensions of psychosocial well-being. We find that, regardless of other factors, regularised status has a strong positive association with migrants’ perception of their rights and freedoms but not with their feeling of being respected in society. Regularised status is positively associated with self-efficacy and negatively with depression. Yet, no net legal status difference is found in migrants’ views on their relations with other migrants or on treatment of migrants by native-borns. The findings are situated within the cross-national scholarship on the ramifications of racialized immigrant (il)legality and its implications for membership and belonging.

摘要

在西方背景下，法律地位对国际移民的融入轨迹和结果显示出深远的影响。在与现有研究的对话中，我们研究了法律地位对俄罗斯联邦中亚移民妇女社会心理健康的影响。我们使用在两个大城市通过受访者驱动抽样收集的调查数据，比较具有合法和非正规法律地位的流动人口在几个相互关联但又截然不同的社会心理健康维度上的差异。我们发现，无论其他因素如何，正规化身份与移民对其权利和自由的看法有很强的正相关关系，但与他们在社会上受到尊重的感觉无关。正规化状态与自我效能呈正相关，与抑郁呈负相关。然而，在移民对他们与其他移民的关系或本地出生的移民的待遇的看法中，没有发现净法律地位差异。调查结果位于关于种族化移民（非）合法性的后果及其对成员资格和归属感的影响的跨国奖学金中。