By way of summarising the analysis developed in this second part, I will comment on the new 1998–2000 ‘Federal Migration Program’ (henceforth, simply Program) presented by the FMS and approved by the government in November 1997 (reported in Sokolov 1998: 126–34). In fact, this policy document epitomises the new policy orientation and marks the end of processes which, in a very short period of time (1991–1998), took Russian migration through three different phases:

1. 1989–1991: no institution/law/policy framework existed, and migration issues were dealt with in an ad hoc fashion.
2. 1992–1993: the emergence of the issues of Russians in the new abroad and Russia’s entry into the international community resulted in the creation of a migration regime which, at least in its general orientation, can be defined as quite ‘liberal’.
3. 1994–1998: a slow but steady process of convergence toward Western practices of restrictive migration policy and migration becoming a security issue.

The new Program on which I am going to comment is made up of policy intentions and goals and it goes without saying that nothing can ensure that actual policy implementation will achieve those goals. Nevertheless, they are important as such, for they reflect the main orientation of the government. The goals are listed below in the same order as they are included in the Program:

The question of supporting forced migrants upon their arrival and facilitating their settlement and integration, which is not listed above, is at the bottom of this list of priorities in the Program. While the document, in fact, contains the declaratory intention of ensuring ‘migrants basic human rights’ and ‘asylum seekers humanitarian treatment’, its main orientation is restrictive, focusing on control and establishing the priority of state interest over migrants’ right.

The first two goals listed above (they concern Russian citizens: controlling internal migration and introducing a mechanism for the regional redistribution of migrants) betray a return to a state interventionist approach and, if implemented, will by necessity result in a restriction on freedom of movement and choosing a place of residence. In concrete, the goal is to try to stop outmigration from less populated regions (the North, Siberia and the Far East) on the one hand, and to redirect the Russians returning from the new abroad toward these same regions on the other. This is a return to Tsarist and Soviet migration policies, with the difference that the settlers once recruited from the central rural regions of European Russian are to be substituted with returning Russians.

The section in the Program devoted to ‘Forced Migration’ reiterates the idea that this flow, within the post-Soviet space, is the result of the inadequate legislation and policies of former Soviet republics in protecting the human rights of national minorities (read ‘compatriots’), causing outright discrimination. Accordingly one of Russia’s priorities is to pressure former Soviet republics (this expression is used in the document in place of the more internationally correct ‘Newly Independent States’) into signing bilateral documents concerning human rights. Again there is no recognition that the return of Russians might simply be the result of individual choices, the indirect message being that if human rights are respected, Russians can peacefully choose integration rather than repatriation, a concept not mentioned in the Program.

The Program is ambivalent on the question of receiving asylum seekers and granting refugee status. While fulfilling the obligations deriving from Russia’s adhesion to the 1951 UN Convention is declared as a priority at the beginning of the document, further passages of the Program introduce some important qualifications on how these obligations must be interpreted. First, it is stated that asylum seekers must be received and refugee status granted following international norms, but that this should be with consideration to the security interest of the state. Second, the Program explicitly states that, because the reception and accommodation of forced migrants and refugees depend on available financial resources, a distinction must be made between asylum seekers who hold the citizenship of the former USSR and those who do not, since Russia has a more compelling responsibility toward the former.

Finally, concerning what I call ‘foreign migration policy’, that is aspects of migration policy which come into the field of international relations among states, a very interesting passage is the one I report below:

The first sentence can be interpreted as a manifestation of the new awareness of Russia’s national interests with respect to the West. The rest of the passage, in my opinion, reflects the widely shared view among Russian officials that adhesion in 1992 to the 1951 UN Convention was premature and did not respond to Russia’s interests at the time, when its borders were practically open. In general, I interpret this passage, as well as the statements of public officials and other documents discussed earlier, as an expression of Russia’s disillusionment with and resentment toward the West in relation to international migration issues.

In this final section, some very general considerations will be drawn from the overview of the migration flows affecting Russia in the 1990s and the analysis of migration policy and politics. As anticipated in the introduction, this was above all to be a problem-oriented paper, in the sense that it is meant to provide information and analysis of a series of issues, without a preliminary discussion of theories and without establishing a general theoretical framework applied to the empirical material presented and analysed. Some of the following reflections, however, try to link the Russian case with wider theoretical issues in the study of migration flows and migration policy. They are preliminary and tentative suggestions, laying the basis for future theoretically oriented more in-depth primary research on all of the issues raised in this paper.

The lack of large-scale emigration from Russia toward the West represents one of those cases in which, as Zolberg suggested (1989), scholars of migration must engage in new thinking to answer why massive migration does not occur despite the existence of strong socioeconomic push factors. In other words, we must theorise not only why people move but also why people stay. Russians who decided to leave the Far East because of worsening living standards did not go to Western Europe – one might think that rationally, once the decision to move has been taken, the place of destination would be chosen to maximise the possibility of finding better opportunities – but to the central and southern regions of European Russia from which they originally emigrated (where they can probably rely on the support of relatives and friends), despite the fact that in many cases socioeconomic conditions in these regions are below the Russian average. The same line of reasoning can be applied to Ukrainians who after 1993, due to a dramatic deepening of the socioeconomic crisis in their country, did not go to Western Europe but preferred to move into Russia. Jews and ethnic Germans have emigrated more than Russians and other nationalities because they encountered no entry barriers and a benign migration regime in their ‘historic homeland’.⁶³ All of these considerations suggest that the presence/lack of pull factors and/or barriers in the country of destination explain mobility decisions to a larger degree than push factors in the country of origin. In particular, it could be argued that current restrictive migration policies in the EU member states are probably more effective than is generally believed, and that they may have partially neutralised the socioeconomic factors that otherwise would have led more immigrants from Russia and other former Soviet republics to head towards Western Europe.

One of the major problems of analyses focused mainly on socioeconomic push and pull factors is that they share the flaws of both structuralism and individualism. The structural differential existing in the socioeconomic and demographic conditions present in the world economy are viewed as directly imposing themselves on individuals, who at the same time are conceptualised as atomised entities who calculate the costs and benefits of migration. To avoid such problems, migration theory must draw from and contribute to the current debate on agency and structure more than it has done to date. As concerns the specific question of Russian repatriation, the most interesting attempt to apply a framework linking agency and structure and micro and macro levels of analysis has been made by Pilkington (1998).

Russians repatriation has been considerable so far but clearly much more limited than was expected, and has shown a declining trend in the last two years, a fact suggesting several considerations. First, the most obvious is that forecasts of massive repatriation were instrumentally inflated in Moscow: that 25 million Russians in the new abroad were considered as the aggregate pool of potential repatriates is a clear misrepresentation of empirical reality. As I have shown in detail elsewhere (Codagnone 1997: 174–86), the aggregate entity of ‘25 million Russians’ must be deconstructed, as it actually consists of separate communities differing with respect to three dimensions: a) migratory history; 2) typology of settlement; 3) cultural distance from the ‘host nation’. Accordingly, a priori, they have different repatriation potentialities. In areas such as Northern Kazakhstan and Eastern Ukraine, Russians have been compactly settled since the XVIII century and live in a completely Russified cultural and linguistic context, where the majority of Kazakhs and Ukrainians themselves speak Russian as their first language. In these cases, the ethno-cultural push factors are minimal, also in consideration of the fact that the governments of these two states have not adopted radical nationalising policies. Such push factors are also irrelevant in Belarus, where President Lukashenko has re-established the official status of the Russian language and aims at reunification with Russia. Ethno-cultural push factors are clearly stronger in the Baltic states, where they are, however, more than compensated for by relatively high living standards representing a clear incentive for Russians to stay. The states where the potential for repatriation are actually high are Azerbaijan and Georgia and the other four Central Asian republics, that is those from which Russians started to leave already in the 1960s and 1970s.

Second, the ethnic push factors resulting from the nationalising policies of the NISs were probably instrumentally exaggerated by Moscow, besides the fact that, even in those cases where such policies were actually implemented, they have been moderated in recent years. After a first drive to give an ethnic content to new state independence, there are increasing signs that some of the NISs are moving toward a less particularistic approach and slowly adapting their policies to the undeniable fact that the populations over which they exercise their authority are multiethnic. Third, as in the case of emigration to the West, push factors, be they ethnic or economic, do not automatically result in mobility decisions unless they are as strong as those produced by ethnic and civil wars (Chechnya and Tajikistan).

As seen, not only were there no large-scale state programmes of repatriation to welcome Russians in Russia, but on the contrary bureaucratic impediments such as the propiska made return and settlement difficult. Although it is just a tentative hypothesis that still has to be subjected to empirical testing, one might argue that the repatriation of Russians to Russia has not been massive and is decreasing also as a result of the policy message sent out from Moscow to ‘compatriots’ in the new abroad which, as illustrated, is ‘stay and integrate’. This hypothesis is in line with Heisler’s proposal (1992) that the study of migration flows must be better integrated with analysis of migration regimes to look at how immigrants are influenced by institutions, policies messages and norms both at the national and the international level.

This consideration offers a bridge linking the discussion of migration flows with that of the migration regime that has emerged in Russia since 1992. Internal and international migration have long been the object of sociological analysis, but, as noted by Zolberg (1989), only very recently has such analysis started to focus also on the effects that state regulatory action has on population movements. For a long time sociology in general, not only in the field of migration, tended to overlook political and institutional dimensions of analysis and focus exclusively on socio-cultural and/or socioeconomic factors. In this sense Heisler’s suggestion seems very appropriate that rational choices or socioeconomic structuralist approaches to migration should be integrated with the insight of the new institutionalist political sociology (1992). This means taking into account national and international institutions and established norms. The hypothesis is that norms and institutions embodied in both national and international migration regimes shape and condition migration. The large immigration received by Western European states from 1950 to 1970, for instance, besides being strongly determined by an increasing demand for labour in these states, also occurred through already institutionalised international relations (when migrants arrived from former colonies) or newly established ones such as the bilateral governmental agreements supporting the ‘guest worker’ systems. When communism collapsed in 1989, none of the Eastern European countries and Soviet republics had established institutional links with Western Europe, a fact that also helps to explain the limited dimension of East-West migration so far. By the same token, the fact that Ukrainians or Armenians mostly go to Russia and not to the West when they migrate for economic reasons is also the result of the existing institutionalised links with Russia.

Empirical evidence shows that differences in wealth and population stocks (as well as in rate of economic and demographic growth) among different areas of the world do not always translate automatically into migration flows (see, for instance, Weiner 1987). Besides, as noted by Cornelius et al. (1994: 8), the established links between business cycles and immigration appear weakened today, as immigration continues even when the countries of reception show signs of economic recession. This means that the link between migration and socioeconomic factors is not so cogent and strict.

From all of these considerations it can be argued that migration flows do not result only from individuals’ decisions determined by (socioeconomic or ethno-cultural) push factors, but also from the ensemble of political decisions, institutionalised practice, and norms that, both at the national and international level, concern and try to regulate entry and exit across national borders. Therefore, what is required theoretically is a political sociology approach integrating the study of migration flows and of migration regimes. There are a number of sub-disciplinary bodies of literature in political sociology from which fruitful insights could be transposed to the study of migration policy and politics. Without entering into the details of each field, I suggest, among others the new institutionalism approach used in both political and economic sociology, the ongoing theoretical debate on the state’s ‘relative autonomy’ and capacity, the social movements and collective action ‘political opportunity structure’ and ‘frame analysis’ perspectives.

More in general, the Russian case has shown how migration policy and politics must be conceived as a multi-layer field including a number of related and co-varying issues and levels such as: a dominant notion of nationhood and citizenship, institutionalised practices, international and geopolitical considerations, the degree of unity/fragmentation of state elites on migration issues, the political debate (including the parliamentary level and the mobilisation of NGOs and migrant associations), institutional competition among different state agencies, the relationship between central and local authorities.

I have illustrated (2.1.1) how, from the very start, the drafting of migration legislation and its implementation in Russia involved a complex and conflictual interaction among different levels: international, federal and regional. A complexity reflected in the contrast between the more liberal and progressive norms embodied in the international human rights adopted by the Russian federal authorities and the more restrictive and at times discriminatory behaviour of local administrators. The question of how the notion of nationhood influences migration regimes could not be more clear in the case of Russian repatriation.

Another kind of empirical evidence brought by the Russian case is the importance of competition among different state bureaucracies. As noted by Yagodin (1997: 160), a certain level of inconsistency in Russian migration policy, especially as concerns asylum seekers, has been produced by the divergent approaches taken by different state agencies, which have acted on the basis of their specific organisational interests. A more liberal approach, which led to Russia’s adhesion to the 1951 UN Convention, characterised the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a number of years (1991–1994) which, under the leadership of Andrey Kozyrev, was initially interested above all in Russia’s reintegration into the international community. A totally opposite position was held instead by regional governments but also by central state bodies more concerned with control (the Ministry of Interior and since 1993 the FMS).

Competition for power and financial resources has contributed in the last three years to the emergence of undocumented migration in general and to the alleged ‘Chinese invasion of the Far East’ in particular as the most pressing problems. The ‘undocumented migration’ issue has been further strengthened in the discourse of ‘Russia as buffer zone’, representing the main argument of a new international migration policy trying to reassert Russia’s interest vis-à-vis the West.

In synthesis, the Russian case shows very clearly that migration policy and politics is a very complex, competitive and conflictual political field. It is also a field characterised by an inherent level of uncertainty. Migration, in fact, is one of the most difficult phenomena to measure objectively and this is a problem not only for researchers but also for policy-makers. This lack of precise and objective data leaves the field open to contrasting and conflicting interpretative frameworks, as manifested most often in what I like to call the ‘number game’, namely the very different estimates proposed by different actors on migration flows and on the stock of undocumented migrants present in a country.