Racialization of Labour Migrants in Russia - Taking Social Movements into Consideration

The anti-immigration movement is one of the most important actors in the Russian social movement network. The goal of this paper is to isolate the key elements of the movement’s frame, the ways in which it is applied in building the discourse around “illegal immigration”. It is shown that the social movement against immigration may be treated both as epiphenomena accompanying global processes of racialization but also as the producer and transformer of societal patterns, discourses and political constellations which has its own morphogenetic, structure-transforming potential. By revealing the relatively autonomous character of many of the key themes of racial discourse in Russia, I argue that although the processes of forming class, nations and ethnicity are intimately intertwined with the biologization of cultural differences, the latter cannot simply be reduced to the former. Racial discourse concerning labor migrants in Russia has been shaped by economic relations and the realization of a nationhood project. Construction of the “migration issue” as a social problem in Russia is in many ways embedded in the tensions obtaining between of the demands of the state for social cohesion and the demands of enterprises for socially disunited labor. My study has demonstrated that the operation of these factors results in the racializing of visually recognizable groups of labor migrants, the social relations in which they are involved, and, more recently, the category of “migrant” itself. Since groups and individuals develop strategies for negotiating their place in the racial order, they are also involved in the process of negotiating access to material and discursive resources. We thus need to identify and examine trends in the shifting logic underlying the construction of the racial other through the migration regime and also take a closer look at individual and group responses and negotiations in respect to this process.