Are 'Migrants' All the Same? Mapping Attitudes to the Resettlers From Post-Soviet South in the Russian Blogosphere

Public attitudes towards ethnic groups are believed to be a factor influencing the spill-over potential in an ethnic conflict. This is especially relevant for the countries that are described by UN reports as multi-ethnic migration attractors. Among those, Russia, despite being world’s second biggest immigration attractor, remains heavily under-researched in many aspects, including public attitudes towards migration. At the same time, In Russia of 2000-2013, ethnic tensions have become a widespread phenomenon resulting into violent conflicts in Moscow and other cities in 2006 to 2014, as well as into general rise of hostility towards social groups united under the label of ‘migrants’ (migranty). Recent opinion polls, media discourse, and Russian-speaking qualitative studies all create an impression that, in the European Russia, inhabitants of and re-settlers from the post-Soviet South have caused the biggest amount of ethnic-oriented public discussion and are perceived as the most dangerous and aggressive ethnicities. This, in its turn, clearly influences public policy towards immigration from the post-Soviet republics, including the controversy between the big-city (Moscow and St.Petersburg) level and state level. But the methodology used in these studies allows neither to compare real public attitudes towards ‘migrants’ and other nations nor to tell whether different groups of ‘migrants’ are perceived the same way. Thus, a closer-to-reality and more detailed look to public perception of ‘migrants’ in Russia is needed to provide grounds for public policy. Recently, the development of big data research methods have allowed for evaluation of textual data without distortions inherent for more traditional social methodologies. Using enhanced topic modeling based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) with Gibbs sampling, coding of selected post collections, statistical analysis, and interpretative reading, we analyze a 360,000-post dataset from the Russian-language Livejournal to map the ethnic attitudes in it, including the attitudes towards ‘migrants’. Our results contradict the existing picture of unified negative perception of post-Soviet re-settlers, as well as suggest that ‘migrants’ are not the ones to cause the biggest amount of hostile discussion in the post-imperial blog discourse of Russia. As regressions of the coding data show, Americans, Germans, and Jews are ‘hostility drivers’ even more powerful than ‘migrants’; North Caucasian nations are perceived as much less ‘livable with’ than Central Asian immigrants; politicization of Caucasian ethnicities is much bigger than Central Asian ones. All in all, the results suggest exaggeration of negativity towards ‘migrants’ in public mind by media and show that the nature of the ethnic-oriented blog discourse in Russia is post-imperial but hardly post-colonial.