The New Russian Migration Policy and Old Phobias towards Ethnic Migrants

Abstract

This article presents the interrelations of governmental migration policy and media responses to it in connection with migration issues and the rise of xenophobia in Russia. Discussion of this topic uses comparative analysis of newspapers’ presentations of migrants in the 1990s, based on research conducted by O. Koulbatchevskaya (1997) for 1992-1996 on five main Russian newspapers, by V. Perevedentsev (2000) for the whole of the 1990s, and also based on evaluation of some other authors’ articles on this topic (e.g. Mukomel 2005, Shnirelman 2000). The media portrayals for the 2000s are based on the author’s evaluation of articles on migration issues of ten major Russian news-papers which were found in Demoscope weekly that collected the special articles on migration topic3 from 2001 to 2008 (in total about 1,100 articles).