Producing state capacity through corruption: the case of immigration control in Russia

ABSTRACT

Immigration control in Russia, one of the world’s top five largest immigrant-receiving countries, is rife with corruption and other informal practices. Instead of framing corruption simply as bad governance, this article shows that informal strategies are intertwined with formal state practices to produce immigration control. Instead of presenting corruption as subversive of state institutions and contradictions between formal and informal practices as a signal of system dysfunction, I argue that state actors’ simultaneous formal and informal activities can work together towards a perhaps surprisingly coherent set of goals. Drawing on ethnographic work with migrants and legal-institutional analysis of Russia’s migration sphere, this article demonstrates how felt immigration control, or the experience of migrants, combines legal and informal strategies that center on coercion. It shows how coercive interactions between migrants and state agents produce visible data and media images that are projected to the public as immigration control.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration control
• corruption
• state capacity
• street-level enforcement
• deportation
• immigration raids

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the following colleagues for close readings of earlier drafts of this paper, thoughtful commentaries, and support: Barbara Junisbai, Venelin Ganev, Karol Czuba, Ed Schatz, participants of a 2019 PONARS workshop in St. Petersburg, and participants of the 2020 EACES-HSE workshop and 9th ICSID conference hosted by the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Research funding was provided by a grant from Nazarbayev University’s Institute for Advanced Studies (IASANU). Many thanks to Daniiar Moldokanov for excellent research assistance and data collection in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Interviews

Interview One. 2017. Altair (a pseudonym), a return migrant who worked in Russia from 2010 to 2013. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, August.

Interview Two. 2017. Male return migrant who worked in Russia in 2016. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. August.

Interview Three. 2017. Azamat (a pseudonym), a return migrant who worked in Russia from 2010 to 2014. Bishkek, Kyrgzystan, August.

Interview Four. 2017. Female return migrant who makes regular work trips to Russia. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, August.

Interview Five. 2017. Male return migrant who worked in Russia in 2015. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. August.

Notes

1. On informality more broadly conceived as complimentary to the provision of public goods, a notable contribution is Murtazashvili (2016).

2. Structured and open-ended interviews were conducted by native Kyrgyz and Russian speakers, both to allow respondents to choose the language most comfortable to them and to overcome trust-related reservations migrants might have when approached by a foreign researcher. Migrant language choices were integrated into the procedures for gaining oral consent. We chose Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as research sites so that migrants could feel secure discussing encounters with state agents and experiences of undocumentedness in Russia. Even with this method, migrants occasionally declined to participate or were visibly nervous until assured their responses would be anonymous. Survey respondents in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were recruited in public places frequented by migrants (e.g. bazaars or train/bus stations) and through snowball methods. Those migrants we spoke with during our visit to the site of the 2018 raid in Moscow were most often at their place of work and conversations were led by human rights advocates often well known to the migrants. Considering the difficulties of accessing migrants and building trust in short-term interactions, the level of candor and detail about interactions with state agents provides important insights into migrants’ perspectives. All human subjects research has been reviewed by the author’s institutional review board.

3. Russian law differentiations between several mechanisms of deportation, including administrative expulsion. I refer to these collectively as deportation.

4. The package of work documents may include a work permit (called a patent for most low-skilled labor migrants), physical receipts that prove the worker has paid taxes on time each month, and a labor contract, which should be officially registered in the database of the migration services.

5. A pseudonym.

6. A statistic cited in the Ministry of Internal Affairs annual report for 2018 gives an important clue to how frequently forcible removal is used. The report says that 43,500 foreign citizens were held in special deportation facilities in 2018, a decrease of 1.9% from the previous year. If in 2018, 125,000 deportation decisions were made (132,000 in 2017), this indicates around 35% (34% in 2017) were processed through holding facilities and involved removal of the migrant from Russia by the government (Ministry of Internal Affairs n.d.).

7. This figure could be underestimated since the temporary holding facilities are also used as pre-trial detention and could theoretically hold an occasional migrant who is eventually cleared of charges.

8. A pseudonym.

9. This observation comes from my own field research but is also documented in work by other scholars (Reeves 2016; Urinboyev 2020).

10. A further nuance should be noted here, since these patterned rituals of interaction between migrant and police officer allow migrants to reduce vulnerability and risk by engaging in a relationship with their uchastkovyi. As one migrant told us in an interview, that the uchastkovyi work to keep migrants “safe” from other police officers who might arrest them. The ways in which state officials perform their functions, then, not only provides some level of security and predictability for migrants, but these rituals also mediate between a law that demands performance indicators and the realities of the Russian labor market that sustains a level of demand for migrant workers regardless of their legal status. What are usually seen as state-diminishing corrupt practices are actually supporting the state’s goals of economic growth by protecting inputs to the labor market.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from Nazarbayev University's Institute for Advanced Studies.