Fear, repression and propaganda: politicising South Asian migrants in Belarus and Georgia

On 11 April, Alexander Lukashenka met with Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif in Minsk. The Belarusian president later announced that his country is ready to accept 150,000 Pakistanis as economic migrants.

“We have agreed to do everything to ensure that our Pakistani friends, workers, peasants, intellectuals, those who want to, can come to Belarus and work here“, said Lukashenko, as quoted by the independent outlet Zerkalo. ”We will provide them with appropriate support. We have also agreed to develop a specific mechanism to bring people to work in Belarus. We will need them very much.”

The news sparked a lively response from Belarusians and led to an unexpected series of events. Social media was flooded with (to put it mildly) critical comments about Lukashenka's announcement. In one video, for instance, Belarusian women were shown preparing pepper spray for the arrival of the Pakistanis. Amidst the heated online chatter there have also been milder reactions, but the prevailing sentiment is anxiety – about safety on the streets, rape, disorder, and even the educational qualifications of the Pakistanis.

Belarus's repressive state apparatus responded to the concerns in its typical manner – by arresting the authors of the most popular posts and forcing them to record videos of repentance (a sadistic genre beloved of the Lukashenko regime). In one such confession, published on a social media channel close to the authorities, a young man apologizes for sharing a fake story about a Pakistani man raping a Belarusian woman. He says he got it from friends and posted about it in the heat of the moment. “This is not my subject at all, I don't want to get into it”, he says. “If you see people from Pakistan, there is no need to treat them with hatred. [...] Everyone should be treated equally.”

The Belarusian interior ministry issued a statement warning against such fake news concerning Pakistani migrants. The apprehended miscreants were branded “provocateurs who deliberately tried to stir up social tension and manipulate public opinion.” There was also a threat to hold criminally liable anyone who might incite ethnic hatred and so undermine the security of Belarus.

“We are not moronic Europe”

The menaces have been accompanied by a more upbeat propaganda campaign. The newspaper Minskaya Pravda argued that migrants from Pakistan “will be strictly registered and monitored by the relevant services”. It reassured readers that there will be no situation like elsewhere in Europe, where migration has led to “poverty, degradation, and high crime rates”. On television, Grigory Azaronak, one of Lukashenka's most notorious propagandists, was merciless in his scorn: “Some Belarusian ladies on TikTok have decided that Pakistanis are coming to rape them en masse and so they are recording videos of themselves buying pepper spray. One gets an impression of Freudian sublimation, that these ladies even expect such a turn of events. But it will be in vain."

Azaronak added that “we are not moronic Europe”. Belarus is a dictatorship, he observed, so “no one here will see any pogroms or sheep being slaughtered, and our ladies won't have to quickly come up with Muslim names for their dark-skinned babies.”

All this amounts to the usual difficult discussion about migration, but distorted through the prism of a violent and authoritarian regime. In terms of demographics and labour shortfalls, the trends in Belarus are no different from those in the West. In Belarus a low birth rate is compounded by politics, which has driven waves of people – usually the better educated – to emigrate. In two decades, Belarus has lost 600,000 people. This corresponds to twice the population of Brest [a historic city in western Belarus] and more than that of Gomel [in the east], observes Bielsat. Half of the figure is accounted for by the 300,000 people who fled the repression that followed the fraudulent 2020 election. Given Belarus’s low fertility rate (1.5 children per woman in 2022), the country’s population looks set to halve by the end of the century.

In an interview with Zerkalo, Belarusian sociologist Gennady Korszunov sees an ulterior motive behind the upswell of popular opposition to the plans to accept immigrant workers from a distant Asian country. In a strictly censored public sphere, open criticism of the authorities is impossible, but hostility towards “foreigners” has seemed acceptable, at least until now. “Most likely, the main reason [for Belarusians’ discontent] is the opportunity to vent accumulated frustration and anger at the overall situation" in Belarus, says Korszunov. The easiest way to do this is to unload on foreigners.

Small numbers

Demographic crisis, labour shortages, migration as a remedy – it all makes for a novel discussion in countries that are themselves perceived as a source of emigrants, where citizens have the habit of leaving in search of work and a better life. Such places include Moldova, Armenia, and Georgia. All three are small countries plagued by weak economies and political instability, which only encourages their citizens to leave.

Around the same time that the “Pakistani affair” was breaking out in Belarus, the Georgian website Sova published a lengthy report by Filip Cereteli on South Asian immigrants in Georgia. Many of the new arrivals are foreign students, and often they are high achievers in medical fields. Cereteli elaborates: “As of the 2024/2025 academic year, there are 20,319 students from India (16,715 in private institutions and 3,604 in public institutions) and 1,186 students from Pakistan (871 in private institutions and 315 in public institutions) studying at Georgian universities. Indian students consistently rank first among all international students in Georgia. Most of them choose medical programmes, which combine relatively affordable prices, English-language instruction, and international recognition of diplomas.”

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In addition to the students, notes Cereteli, Georgia is attracting another category of migrants from South Asia – “those who come to earn money. They are workers, couriers, construction workers, cleaners, and cooks."

Both groups – students from wealthier Indian or Pakistani families and their poorer compatriots who come to work – encounter racism. Often it manifests itself as a reluctance among locals to rent accommodation or provide other services. Georgians have also vented their negative feelings towards the new arrivals on social media. The fact that so many Georgians live and work abroad does not seem to affect attitudes towards immigrants. Indeed, that need not be so surprising.

It matters little whether a country is poor or rich, democratic or authoritarian, or whether it sends migrants abroad or accepts them. Migration, which has been a universal human experience since time immemorial, is always a source of new hierarchies and cycles of discrimination.

This is one subject discussed by Krytyka Polityczna’s Kaja Puto, who seeks to answer the question of why politicians with a migrant background so often express anti-migrant views. Puto mentions in particular US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban migrant workers; Priti Patel, the British Home Secretary in Boris Johnson's government, "who promoted a plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda and a series of restrictions on migrants"; Tomio Okamura, "a far-right politician of Japanese origin. He was famous for calling for pigs to be kept near mosques, a boycott of kebabs and a total ban on the practice of Islam. Puto also mentions Geert Wilders, "a Dutch politician known for his anti-migrant rhetoric": "Her mother was born in East India (now Indonesia) and Geert's wife is a Hungarian of Turkish descent." "The examples of politicians with a migration background who oppose the reception of migrants are numerous," concludes Puto, "just political hypocrisy? Certainly not – if anything. In many cases, it is the emotions that are brought into politics from the streets. Migrants are not monolithic, but there are class, religious, gender, ethnic and many other tensions among them.”