Shadow legal integration: migrant legal integration, Russian style

Abstract

This article examines how Uzbek migrants become incorporated into Russian society under conditions of legal precarity, discretionary enforcement and pervasive informality. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2026 among Uzbek migrants in Russia and their families and communities in Uzbekistan, it develops the concept of shadow legal integration to explain how social and economic incorporation can deepen without a corresponding movement towards legal security. The article argues that repeated encounters with migration authorities, police, employers, intermediaries and migrant networks generate practical legal knowledge that migrants test, revise and circulate over time. This process of legal adaptation enables migrants to navigate the interaction between formal rules and informal practices while rem aining vulnerable to detention, deportation and administrative uncertainty. Ethnographic analysis of deportation, migration bureaucracy, legal brokerage, document economies and changing migration governance after 2022 further demonstrates that such competence is not a fixed repertoire but requires continual recalibration as legal and enforcement environments change. Shadow legal integration thus identifies how learning to navigate the intersection of formal and informal practices can itself become a mode of incorporation. The article contributes to migration and socio-legal scholarship by showing that migrant integration and legal security need not develop in parallel.