Narrow, winding stairs lead up to 60-year-old housecleaner Ophelia Hakobian’s poorly furnished room on the second floor of an apartment building in the Istanbul district of Kumkapi. The tiny room, barely 1.5 square meters in area, contains hanging laundry, a table and chairs and photographs of Hakobian’s son and grandchildren.
A Russian government program that pays Russian-speakers to migrate to Russia is upsetting many Armenians who believe it is contributing to a demographic problem in Armenia.
Each year, International Women’s Day arrives on March 8 in the Armenian village of Dzoragyugh amid a dark cloud of irony. Ninety-eight percent of the village’s male population --nearly half of its population of 5,000 people -- has migrated abroad in search of work.
Energy-rich Azerbaijan is becoming a regional magnet for illegal labor migrants. The government is intent on containing the trend, but a recent Constitutional Court decision to overturn stiff fines for employing illegal migrants is injecting an element of uncertainty into the issue.
Fardin Saidulayev manages a newspaper kiosk in the Russian city of Novosibirsk, where he is one of the few Tajik laborers to hold a coveted work permit. Yet he faces an uncertain new year. As of January 1, new Russian legislation bans foreigners from working in trade. Saidulayev says he now lives in constant fear he will be fired, or even deported.
At a rundown football stadium in Istanbul, Nigerian team members huddled together to say a prayer as they prepared to take on Cameroon. A star-and-crescent Turkish flag fluttered above them in the late afternoon breeze, a couple of hundred African fans were in the stands and, outside, a group of curious Turks looked on as the city’s own version of the Africa Cup of Nations got under way.
Darika Mambetova lives in a two-room apartment in Kyrgyzstan with her three adolescent grandsons. Her son and daughter-in-law, the boys’ parents, haven’t been back from Russia since they left two years ago in search of work. Another daughter lives in Kazakhstan.
Mambetova, 63, fears she is unable to provide the boys the kind of guidance and discipline that they need.
