Youth Migration In GBAO: Staying, Leaving, Coming Back?

Abstract

In the place where I was born and grown up, Khorog, migration has always been an essential and normal part of every family’s life. I remember that every household had one or two migrants in their families. It was perceived as a culture or something similar, sending someone from your family to Russia. In particular, it was quite practiced in regard to men, and what is good is that most of them were supposed to leave for Russia once they graduated university. Men (and sometimes women as well) left the region for several years in order to enhance their economic conditions, support and help their families, get prepared for an independent life (building a house and earning money for marriage), and then come back and continue living their lives. It was considered an important step in order to get on a higher rung of life's ladder. Since then, nothing has changed except that people, in particular youth, tend to migrate more, immediately after graduation from high school, with the very small intentions of coming back, It led to the situation that the region- Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO), Khorog and other rural areas, are getting less populated, with the remaining old people, very few youth (who decided to stay there), and students (who have not decided yet whether they will stay or will also leave after their studies). For that reason, I decided to study the migration process and its causes in GBAO with a focus on the youth generation and their intentions regarding their migration decisions: whether they will stay in the region, migrate, or leave and then come back. For studying this question, it is very important to focus on the motivations behind the decisions that youth make. Another reason for choosing this topic is that different motivations and causes push people, in particular Tajik people, to migrate, which are not the same for all migrants. Generally, current migration studies mostly focus on and study the economic and social factors as the main factors of migration in Tajikistan, in particular youth migration. These are general factors and causes of migration that refer to every Tajik migrant despite specific characteristics or distinctions (age, gender, group, social factors, and so on). However, this thesis argues that the motivations and causes of migration are not the same in the country and are distinguished due to the specific conditions and characteristics, as in the context of GBAO. It is to say that general motivations and driving factors of migration cannot be applied to all Tajik migrants, and they differ from

each other. This paper will look at how the causes and factors of the migration in GBAO are different from those in other regions of Tajikistan.