Opposition to immigration in contemporary Russia

ABSTRACT

The study examines sources of opposition to immigration in contemporary Russia. It distinguishes between two types of opposition to immigration: exclusionary attitudes based on national membership and exclusionary attitudes based on race or ethnicity, directed exclusively at foreigners with non-Slavic or non-European origins. Findings indicate that a quarter of ethnic Russians can be classified as “racial exclusionists”; they are willing to admit immigrants who share a race/ethnic group with most of Russia’s people but object to the admission of racially/ethnically different immigrants. Another 42% of ethnic Russians are classified as “total exclusionists”; they object to immigration of all foreigners, regardless of their race/ethnicity. Multivariate analysis focuses on the impact of perceived collective vulnerability, human values, and socio-demographic attributes. Opposition to immigration in Russia is further situated within temporal and cross-national comparative perspectives. Apparently, exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants who share a race/ethnicity with most Russians increased between 2006 and 2016.

KEYWORDS:

• Opposition to immigration
• anti-immigrant attitudes
• ethnic minorities
• human values
• Russia
• exclusion

Supplementary data

The supplementary materials for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2018.1534473.

Notes

1. Many of these Ukrainian citizens are Russian-speakers or ethnic Russians.

2. All regression models presented later in the paper were also re-estimated without value variables. Their results are presented in the supplementary materials (Tables S1 and S2).

3. The analysis is presented here and further implemented using the appropriate weight procedure recommended by ESS.