Screenshot of an article from Russia Post. Used with permission.

Director of research center SOVA Alexander Verkhovsky says fearmongering about immigrant labor has become Russian officialdom’s default rhetoric. In his article published on Russia Post on  December 19th 2024, he argues that recent anti-immigration efforts presage a transformation of the official ideology. An edited version is republished on Global Voices with permission from Russia Post. 

Note on the use of the terms “migrant” and “migration”: While the Russian language distinguishes between migrant, immigrant and emigré, the term migrant [мигрант] is the one used in media and daily language to describe, from a Russo-centric point of view, groups of people coming from former Soviet Republics — mostly Moldova, the South Caucasus and Central Asia to work in usually manual jobs across Russia, mostly in urban setting. Because of the perceived — and often amplified in nationalistic discourses — difference in language, or religion, or skin color, the term migrant carries implications of foreignness. While, in English, we would refer to these people as immigrants and the rhetoric around them as anti-immigration, in Russia the terms used are translated as migrant and migration.

The current wave of anti-immigration campaign in Russia, as the research center Sova noticed, began back in the fall of 2021, without any apparent reason yet very intensively. Before that, there were also several anti-immigration campaigns, connected also with hate crimes towards immigrants. 

After a six-month pause at the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine (February 2022), the Russian government’s anti-immigration campaign started to pick up. A recent Verstka report shows that 2023 “was a record year over the past five years for the number of posts about migrants in pro-government and far-right media and public [Telegram] channels.”

A sharp rise of anti-migration rhetoric

Those Telegram posts highlight migrants’ supposed high and rising criminality. The chair of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, is especially active in this respect; he has even suggested that Russia should stop using migrant labor altogether.

According to official data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, however, migrant crime has not changed significantly for years, and, in 2023–24, it even went down.

Some media, including Kommersant, have repeatedly pointed this out.

Based on official criminal record data, criminologists have noted that the share of crimes committed by noncitizens, including the most serious crimes, is stable and definitely somewhat lower than the share of noncitizens in the total population. These facts, however, failed to counter aggressive anti-immigration voices.

Protecting Russian national identity?

Bastrykin, with his anti-immigration rhetoric, has found support on the Presidential Council for Human Rights. For several years now, Kirill Kabanov, a member of the council, has spoken out on these issues, asserting that “immigrants with a different civilizational code” cannot be integrated. He believes that most of them do not wish to live based on Russian laws, that many are Russophobes and any proposals in favor of integrating immigrants constitute “strategic sabotage.”

Another complaint about immigrants — they mean unwanted competition in the labor market — was fairly common previously, but it is no longer a winning one, as Russia currently has almost-zero unemployment and is suffering from an acute shortage of workers across almost all sectors of its economy.

Immigrants are commonly accused of “disrespecting” the culture and norms of Russian society. This claim is more difficult to formalize and support with quantitative data, yet it is often voiced, including by the president himself. Just recently, at the session of the Presidential Council for Human Rights in early December, Vladimir Putin talked about the need to maintain “ethno-cultural balance” and expressed concern that migrants do not know “our traditions.”

Such statements, in essence, are about protecting Russian national identity, but, interestingly enough, almost no one frames it that way.

Russian politicians do not want to frame it that way — which is popular among their Western counterparts, who link concerns about immigration to the protection of national identity and the protection of “one’s own civilization.”

In the current Russian rhetoric, the national identity and civilization need to be protected first and foremost from the West.

Mentions of immigrants as a threat to Russian identity occur only at the middle level of the power vertical. For example, in the words of a prosecutor of the Department for Security, Interethnic Relations and Countering Extremism and Terrorism in the Prosecutor General’s Office, “many [labor immigrants] do not want to comply with local laws and norms of behavior, demonstratively bring in their own culture and disrespect the local population;” “we are losing our identity.”

Banning migrant children from schools

Another common anti-immigration complaint is the supposed large number of children with poor Russian language skills in schools. It is a real problem for schools, and it has long been a source of frustration. Yet the government made no effort, either at the federal or the regional level, to provide Russian-language education to these children, either inside or outside of school.

In December, a swift decision was reached and implemented. The Duma passed an amendment to the law on education in its first reading and then unanimously the very next day in its second and third readings. This amendment sets out two mandatory conditions for access to education, starting from primary school: a foreign citizen must prove they legally reside in Russia and pass a special Russian language exam.

This amendment will bar from school education not only children with poor Russian language skills, but also those whose parents, for various reasons, failed to secure proper documents in Russia — a situation that, according to human rights advocates, is quite common.

“Yet the amendment does not provide any Russian language courses for the children deprived of their constitutionally guaranteed right to education.”

The scale of the anti-immigration campaign

Some officials are adopting openly racist language: the head of Moscow Region police, for example, has publicly expressed his intent to “lighten up” his region.

Members of the political class commonly pick up the theme of the “immigrant threat.” For instance, the (very mildly) oppositionist New People party, while avoiding openly anti-migration rhetoric, has pushed for a ban on wearing the niqab in public places, as well as on conducting religious services in residential buildings.

The “threat of immigration” is sometimes viewed as an instrument of the West’s hybrid warfare against Russia, akin to the mass transit of West Asian migrants from Belarus to Poland in spring 2021, but on a much larger scale. For example, this is precisely how the most popular “voenkor” [Telegram channels describing Russia's war on Ukraine] channel, Rybar, explained the UK’s support for a veteran Russian NGO, the Civic Assistance Committee, that helps refugees and other noncitizens inside Russia.

Immigrants in the mass media

The frequency of the words “immigrants” and “illegals” in the mass media indicates a growing usage of these words since the beginning of the war in Ukraine and especially since the summer of 2023.

Looking at how the word “immigrant” is represented in the 10 most-cited Telegram news channels, one can see that the unapologetically nationalist channel Readovka stands out, but some growth is evident across the other channels as well.

What the general public thinks

In 2021, the level of xenophobia toward Central Asians, according to the Levada Center, reached fever pitch in 2018, but by 2021 the attitude toward them had become less hostile. This suggests that it was not pressure from below that provoked the start of the anti-immigration campaign. The attitude toward Central Asians improved even further in 2022.

However, an August 2024 poll by the Levada Center delivered more alarming results.

Immigration is reported as the second most pressing public concern, alongside corruption and the conflict with the West, which includes the war in Ukraine (the top concern was rising prices).

Half as many respondents are concerned about a “crisis of morality and culture,” including the LGBTQ+ and child-free “movements,” for example, that have been trumped up by government propaganda. Concern about immigration is 6 percent higher than the previous “record” of 2013, spiking in the last year or two.

The heightened concern about immigration is attributable to the government’s campaign, since the number of immigrants is actually dropping, and the same is true of immigrant crime level. Moreover, competition in the labor market is less of an issue nowadays.

Two plausible explanations for the intensification of anti-migration rhetoric

The first is pragmatic. Of course, from a broad economic perspective, an anti-migration campaign seems irrational. However, it benefits large corporations that heavily rely on migrant labor but are unwilling and unable to significantly increase their wages.

Large corporations would expect to have preferential access to labor outside of Russia. Moreover, if the state bars immigrants from the free labor market, these corporations will be able to bind foreign workers to their jobs.

Still, it is unclear how this “bondage” can be practically implemented, since many citizens of Tajikistan hold Russian passports and Kyrgyzstan is a member state of the Eurasian Economic Union, meaning its citizens enjoy the same labor market rights as Russian citizens.

The second explanation for the intensification of anti-immigration rhetoric is ideological.

We may be witnessing a gradual transformation of the official nationalism proclaimed in the documents and statements of 2011–13. From then until the late 2010s, Russia as a “state-civilization” was conceived as having an Orthodox and ethnically Russian core, around which revolved other traditional peoples and religions of the country. These included the more or less allied nations of the former USSR, the broader “Russian World” (though, since 2014, the last two groups have dramatically intersected in Ukraine) and finally a wide alliance of defenders of “traditional values.” This whole “matryoshka” was positioned to oppose the West (though there were allies there as well).

The beginning of the transformation may have come with the 2020 constitutional amendments. One of them mentions “the Russian language as the language of the state-forming people, which is part of the multinational union of equal peoples of Russia.”

This formula which stresses the Russian language rather than Russian ethnicity embraces all the ethnic minorities that make up the Russian multinational nation since almost all of them are fluent in Russian and thus “our people.” The us-versus-them opposition is, therefore, about foreigners who are considered “aliens.” This includes, first and foremost, labor immigrants, mostly from Central Asia and partly from the South Caucasus (and not Moldova or Ukraine).

The duration and scope of the ongoing anti-immigration campaign suggests that we are dealing with a strategic change of policy.

Whereas the earlier formula of “Russia as a state-civilization” implied that Russia was to form (if not to lead) an alliance with other “traditional” civilizations against the West, today this task has been enlarged to include protecting “civilization Russia” itself from harmful influences from the West and “the South.”

Even though this is not explicitly stated, this appears to be precisely the point of the current anti-immigration measures.