Anti-Migrant Discourse in the Context of Strengthening Nationalism in Russia

The paper is devoted to the peculiarities of Russian political discourse and features of public consciousness linked with migration. Migration as a sociocultural threat has acquired special significance in Russia due to the active influx of migrants into the country after the collapse of the USSR. On the one hand, expanded the boundaries of migration analysis in line with the theory of the "clash of civilizations", and on the other, it gave rise to a huge amount of speculation on this topic in the public sphere.

We consider Russian society as multination and multireligious society with new-authoritarian regime which surely needs special mechanism of legitimation. Spreading and supporting nationalistic ideas at all level of state power become one of these mechanism.

Our research task is to find out main resources, social base of anti-migrant discourse determined by nationalism in modern Russian society.

As an empirical date, we used monitoring data from the Institute of Socio-Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1992-2025) which let us see dynamic of public opinion during long term and data of discourse analysis of public discourse.

Analyzing public consciousness we pay attention to such indicators as political values, ideological orientation and ideas about the future, which let us wee the increasing the share of people supporting ultra-patriotic and nationalistic ideas expressed by the slogan “Russia for Russians”.

We describe the main centers producing migrant-phobia and antimigrant sentiment as some NGO, political parties and even state agencies. We show how revival of civil nationalism leads to ethnic intolerance and migrant-phobia which is accompanied by a number of negative social practices.