The issue of immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment in Russia has been in the news in the past couple days.

One article, "Russia's Xenophobia Problem", Salon, May 1, 2012 by Khristina Narizhnaya, gives an overview of the issue and how it is playing out in Russia. A second one, "Russia to boost fight against illegal immigration", RT, 27 April 2012, focuses on moves to deal with undocumented workers.

Russia, like many countries, is seeing immigrants from less developed and poorer areas on its periphery, in particular Central Asia and the Caucasus.  Indeed, Russia is second only to the US in the numbers of immigrants entering -- according to the RT piece, official state statistics show that 7 million immigrants have come to Russia in since 2000. But most of the migrants working in Russia are doing so illegally.  As one person cited in the article notes, "It’s profitable to hire cheap, powerless Tajiks."  Medvedev likewise focused on 

the benefits of migrant inflow, he observed that to a large extent it compensated for natural population loss, stabilized the labor market.

Vladimir Putin, just re-elected president of the country, has also said that "migrants strengthen Russia’s economy and broaden its demographics."  Likewise, Medvedev notes that "Russia’s migration policy should provide the economy with qualified labor force."  So as we've seen elsewhere, the arguments for immigration are economic; especially in a country like Russia which has seen a decrease in population, immigration helps ensure economic growth.

But Medvedev also said that priority should be given to Russians who live outside of Russia.

This focus on bringing in ethnic Russias is in part a reaction to xenophobia.  According to the Salon article,

Xenophobia toward non-whites is rising in Russia, especially toward migrant workers from Central Asia and the restive North Caucasus region, where unemployment is rampant.

Polls demonstrate how widespread the problem is. One in five Russians strongly agrees with the slogan “Russia for Russians,” while 43 percent believe that any measure taken to protect “my people” is good, according to research by Higher School of Economy professor Mark Ustinov. Nearly 70 percent of Russians have negative feelings toward people of another ethnicity, Ustinov’s research found.

The growing influx of migrant workers — 13 to 14 million annually by some expert estimates — most of them temporary, from poor former Soviet republics Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, exacerbates the already tense racial and ethnic relations in Russia.

Partly in response, Putin "proposed to toughen immigration regulation, including boosting penalties for violations and requiring Russian language and culture exams for all workers during his election campaign in January."

Current Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev has just approved a new immigration law, and "has called for more drastic efforts to counter illegal immigration." 

The examples of violence against non-Russians in the country is a sign that in Russia too we are seeing tension between economic and macrostructural factors and imaginings of the political space that is Russia. 

Click to read the whole Salon article.

Click for the RT article.

 As mentioned in Chapter 8 of Castles and Miller, and as we discuss in class today, states have undertaken a number of measures to regulate immigration. The US does not provide for permanent settlement of unskilled labor; it does however provide a number of temporary visa options, including the J-1 visa. Buzzsaw writer Pete Blanchard has written two pieces about J-1 visa holders . The first about foreign students who are working in Tompkins County:  "An Exchange Program" (Dec 8, 2010); and the second about J-1 visa students who went on strike at the Hershey plant where they were working:  "From Hotels to Hersheys: Foreign students fight for rights" (Sept 7, 2011).  The J-1 visa is

an exchange program that allows students to work and travel in the country for no more than four months. Most of the jobs fall into the realm of seasonal work, with many students working at restaurants, hotels, or summer camps as counselors.

But as Pete notes in his article, these students are often exploited as cheap labor.

Given the demand for unskilled labor and the limited number of possibilities for legal immigration of people for those jobs, the exploitative outcome of the J-1 program seems almost inevitable. 

Think about why the labor - visa situation is set up that way in the US.

Here's a link to the 2010 US Dept of Homeland Security Yearbook of Immigration Statistics.  The stats I cited in class today are in a table on page 18; I calculated the percentages myself.

The yearbook is huge, 110 pages, and breaks immigration down by categories, years (from 2001 to 2010), countries of origin, etc.

We discussed how, in order to understand migration, we also need to understand the notion of agency among migrants.  While migrants respond to macrostructural forces, they also make their own choices.

An example of this is laws intended to reduce the numbers of undocumented migrants.  At the macrostructural level, this creates a contradiction in the case of the US, because at the same time as laws make it more difficult for undocumented workers, there remain structural factors that lead to continued demand for unskilled labor.

As journalist Andrew Leonard notes, there is a belief in the US that making conditions intolerable for undocumented migrants will lead them to voluntarily leave the US, or to "self-deport."

Self-deportation, as practiced today, is supposed to be the only choice left available to immigrants whose life has been made miserable by new, punitive laws put into place at the state level.

Yet in fact migrants have other choices; this is where the notion of agency interacting with the continuing macrostructural demand for unskilled labor comes in.  As Leonard notes,

In fact, the opposite may be happening. By making it even more difficult for non-citizen laborers to work in the normal economy, the new laws are pushing some workers even further into the shadows. The harder the crackdown, the more people are going underground. Laws aimed at encouraging self-deportation are just ratcheting up the misery.

In particular, it has "heightened the exploitation and abuse that exists in the underground economy, based on complete lack of options for those trapped in the underground economy to find better jobs.”

Read the whole article. Leonard includes links to a number of studies and articles related to this situation.

Think also about what would have to change at the macrostructural level to change this kind of dynamic.