The State of Immigration Control in Russia

• In Event: Rethinking the Russian State: The Politics of Policymaking

Abstract

What does immigration control tell us about the state? In the Russian case, discussions of the state are often overwhelmed by the perspective that because governance falls so far short of the Weberian ideal, state function can only be described in terms of its pathologies. The picture of immigration control could easily parrot this same perspective: as the 2nd largest country of immigration, Russia boasts a massive population of illegal immigrants, is riddled with corruption in the migration services, has no integration policy to speak of, and as a result migrants suffer from a general lack of access to basic rights and services. While this view of the state and of migration control can be presented as “true” based on ample empirical evidence, such accounts do not give a particularly nuanced picture of the state in Russia.

Migdal’s (2001) perspective on the state pushes beyond the ideal-typical framework of Weber and advances the idea that the real-typical state is full of contradictions. In his view of imperfect states, one of the goals is not to measure states against a normative ideal but rather to explain why states don’t fall apart. From this perspective, exploring immigration control in Russia can begin to explain the truly massive state efforts to reach certain seemingly contradictory goals not as a lack of coordination or capacity, but rather as a multifaceted set of practices. In particular, the state must ensure there are enough migrants in the system to ensure economic vibrancy amid a shrinking native labor force, yet avoid public backlash by presenting an image of resolute and capable immigration control. In this context, Russian officials have not given way to the overt populism of their Western counterparts. But this should not be taken to indicate that immigration is not a salient issue for the public or that the government is not attentive to public opinion. Because of this, the Russian case helps comparativists to tease out the contours and components of modern populism in its many and varied forms by presenting a much different picture of the corrupt elite, pure public, and scapegoated minority than current theories of populism allow for.

This paper draws on a new database of court cases in Russia constructed by the author’s research team, supplemented by official data on migration raids and deportation and the corresponding picture of these events in the media. It delves into the differences between how the state responds to the migration violations of foreign citizens and employers differently. While empirically this study contributes to the comparative literature on migration and employer sanctions, theoretically it gets to the heart of claims about the state and its legitimacy. This paper parses the Weberian conception of authority into its reliance on inner justification and use of external means. I explore how legitimacy claims (inner justifications) are directed toward the public, while coercion (external means) is directed towards migrants. Rather than maintaining a Weberian perspective which might argue that this contradiction leads the state to act unjustly or that contradictions are a testament to a dysfunctional state (or one with weak capacity), I pursue a framework informed by Migdal’s work that allows multiple sets of rules and norms to interact. This allows us to see the Russian state as one that uses visible and symbolic displays of state capacity such as deportation and other court statistics to create an image of immigration control for the public, while deploying these mechanisms selectively in order to maintain a sufficient number of migrants in the country.

This paper is part of a larger project that seeks to reconceptualize the state in Russia by looking at the activities of the state that create an image of immigration control (official rhetoric, law and policy making, and bureaucratic practices, especially those related to the generation of statistics), and how that image interacts with public opinion (based on survey data, media content, and ethnographic data) towards the production of legitimacy.

Author

• Caress Rene Schenk, Nazarbaev University