Ethnic Hierarchy and Public Attitudes towards Immigrants in Russia

Abstract

Explanations of anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe have been centred around the labour market competition and group threat theories. The paper tests these theories with the data from Russia and finds some support for the group threat theory. Attitudes towards several immigrant ethnic groups are analysed separately. While Russians generally accept Ukrainians and Moldovans as their potential neighbours, they are more hostile to immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia. This ethnic hierarchy is shared by all

Ethnic Intermarriage in Russia: The Tale of Four Cities

“…Another factor is the attitudes of ethnic Russians in Moscow towards other ethnic groups, which vary from more positive for the groups of European origin (such as Ashkenazi Jews or Ukrainians) to more negative for the groups of Southern origin (such as Armenians or Tatars) (Bessudnov 2016;Bessudnov and Shcherbak 2019). Perhaps all these factors explain both the relative openness of ethnic Russians in Moscow to intermarriage and the lack of a trend towards more intermarriage over time.…”

“…The result of this was undercounting of recent immigrants (mostly from Ukraine and Central Asian states), many of whom were not registered. For example, the 2010 census counted about 300,000 Uzbeks and 200,000 Tajiks in Russia, while police data about the number of foreign passport-holders for December 2012 (based on migration cards completed while crossing the Russian border) included 2.3 million Uzbek nationals and 1.1 million Tajik nationals (Bessudnov 2016). This problem was likely to be more severe in Moscow, where immigrants constituted a larger share of the population, and less severe in other regions, for ethnic groups that were indigenous or represented earlier immigration waves, and for older cohorts.…”

Ethnic Discrimination in Multi-ethnic Societies: Evidence from Russia

“…Official statistics for the most recent immigration flows are poor, but in 2012 there were over 2 million Uzbek and over 1 million Tajik nationals in Russia, mainly employed in low-skilled occupations in the Moscow region and in other metropolitan areas. The number of Ukrainian passport-holders in Russia was 1.4 million in 2012, and it has significantly increased after the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict in 2014 (Bessudnov, 2016).…”

“…A number of previous studies used survey data to explore attitudes towards immigrants in Russia. Antiimmigrant sentiment is stronger in Russia than in most other European countries, whereas the explanatory power of the models that try to predict attitudes towards immigrants with the indicators of socio-economic position and the attitudinal variables is much lower (Gorodzeisky, Glikman and Maskileyson, 2015;Bessudnov, 2016), although explanations based on group threat and economic competition theories cannot be dismissed (Bahry, 2016). Ethnic Russians are on average more negative about immigrants than ethnic minorities (Gorodzeisky and Glikman, 2017), and the opposition towards immigration is often based on racial prejudice (Gorodzeisky, 2019).…”

Urban multilingualism: language policy, discourses, and practice

“…20 лет, СПб), курировавшим работу службы клининга, в Пулково после терактов весной 2017 г. были изменены правила найма уборщиков: в двух зонах из трех (международной и русской) теперь необходима постоянная регистрация для работников клининговой службы, и наем осуществляется только по договору, что автоматически привело к заметному для других сотрудников изменению звукового ландшафта, тогда как в общей зоне остались уборщики, которые говорят между собой и по телефону на узбекском. На возможность разговаривать на своем языке вслух, как и на другие признаки «видимости», также оказывает влияние мигрантофобия и уровень страхов в обществе, которые достаточно высоки (см., например, [Деминцева 2013;Bessudnov 2016]). Здесь будут рассмотрены только осознанные и отрефлектированные респондентами в интервью принципы выбора языка на рабочем месте и в транспорте (или другом публичном пространстве).…”