Representation of Migrants in the Public Discourse of Russia

Abstract

Public attitudes toward immigrants in contemporary Russia are rather negative and significantly more hostile than in European countries. To trace the relationship between attitudes toward migrants and their representation in the media and political discourse I turn to the Russian mass media as one of the meaning-making factories in the society. As a database to evaluate whether there has been a change in stereotyping of migrants in the mass media over the recent decade, I utilize the newspapers sub-corpus of the Russian National Corpus. On the basis of a content-analysis of 254,000 texts from 2008 to 2014 I conclude about both official and popular dissociations of migrants with the idea of ‘ethnic criminality’ in the period after 2010.On the popular level, the association between ethnicity and criminality has declined, even though references to ethnic groups and migrants increased over the same period of time.