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.

摘要

俄罗斯是世界前五个最大的移民接收国之一，其移民控制充斥着腐败和其他非正式行为。本文并没有将腐败简单地定义为不良治理，而是表明非正式策略与正式的国家实践交织在一起，以产生移民控制。与其将腐败视为对国家制度的颠覆以及将正式和非正式实践之间的矛盾视为系统功能失调的信号，我认为国家行为者同时进行的正式和非正式活动可以共同努力实现一套可能令人惊讶的连贯目标。本文利用移民的民族志工作和对俄罗斯移民领域的法律制度分析，展示了移民控制的感受，或移民的经历，结合以强制为中心的法律和非正式战略。它展示了移民和国家代理人之间的强制性互动如何产生可见的数据和媒体图像，作为移民控制向公众投射。