Central Asians now do most of the picking on Britain’s farms.
In 2025 they received 78.5 percent of all U.K. Seasonal Worker visas issued, up from 7.6 percent in 2021. In the first quarter of 2026, Central Asians again received over three-quarters of the visas. Today Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan are the four largest source countries for the temporary workers scheme, ahead of Kenya, Moldova, and every other supplier.
Ukraine sent roughly 19,900 seasonal workers in 2021 but just 530 in 2025; Russia fell from 2,276 to 11. The 2022 invasion trapped Ukrainian men in uniform and shut off Russian recruitment. British operators turned to a region with a young, surplus workforce and shrinking places to send it: Central Asia. U.K.-wide applications to the route rose 23 percent in the year to March 2026.
Russia’s turn against Central Asian labor pushed in the same direction. Since January 2025, visa-free migrants may remain in Russia only 90 days per calendar year. After the 2024 Crocus City Hall attack, which was blamed on Tajik nationals, deportations rose 17 percent in the first half of 2025 and residence permits fell by about a third, alongside xenophobic raids recorded across the country.
Britain is a hedge against that hostility, but a very narrow one. Fewer than 40,000 six-month visas a year, region-wide, sit against the millions of Central Asians still working in Russia, the source of remittances equivalent to 45 percent of GDP in the region’s poorer states. The British visa offers no settlement, no dependents, and six months’ work in any 10 before a mandatory exit. The U.K. is trimming it, too. The quota fell from 45,000 to 42,900 places in 2026.
Kyrgyzstan, the least populous of the four sending states, was issued 12,650 seasonal visas in 2025 – twice as many as Uzbekistan’s 6,307, though Uzbekistan has roughly five times the people. Kazakhstan took 5,767 and Tajikistan 5,712. Nearly everyone who reaches the application stage is approved, with the grant rate around 99 percent. Therefore, the real filter resides inside each country, not at the British end.
Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan let British operators hire directly; Tajikistan routes applicants through a Ministry of Labor shortlist that has become a chokepoint for alleged extortion. Uzbekistan, meanwhile, is steering its labor more toward Europe and the Gulf through a state migrant center opened with EU backing in 2025. Because operators rehire proven pickers, an early lead compounds – whoever sent the most last season sends the most in the following year.
The labor migration route also spills over into asylum. Asylum claims in the U.K. from the four Central Asian states under discussion climbed from a few dozen in 2020 to a 2023 peak – 832 Uzbeks, 495 Tajiks, 461 Kazakhs, 233 Kyrgyz – before easing. Overstay concerns feed talk in the U.K. government of tightening the scheme.
Britain is not absorbing Central Asia’s exodus from Russia; it is skimming a few tens of thousands of workers a year from whichever governments and recruiters move fastest. For now tiny Kyrgyzstan, not the giants next door, is in the lead. But that lead that could disappear as quickly as it appeared if Moscow, Brussels, or London change migration policy course again.