This chapter examines how ordinary residents of the Russian capital relate to the sharply increased influx of migrant workers to Russia, and to Moscow in particular. For several decades now, Western academics have scrutinised cross-border migration to Western European countries through the prism of local residents’ perceptions. However, far more attention has been paid to the problems of the migrants themselves than to the attitudes of the host populations.

Similarly in Russia: despite the growing volume of academic literature on diverse aspects of the lives of migrant workers, efforts at viewing this issue through the eyes of the host population are fairly rare. Well-established centres for the study of public opinion (Fond ‘Obshchestvennoe mnenie’ (FOM), the Levada Centre and others) periodically conduct large-scale surveys nationwide or within specific regions, and the collated ‘percentages’ are then commented on, above all in the press and online media, as well as in social media. Less often are such ‘official’ surveys, or surveys conducted by teams of researchers, analysed in academic literature (see, for example, Leonova 2004; Tiuriukanova 2009; Grigor'eva et al. 2010). There are practically no studies that for comparative or analytical purposes draw on Western experience of studying public attitudes towards migrants, and employ the conceptual approaches used in these works to explain the reasons for various public sentiments.

Instead, research on perceptions of migration in Russia consists overwhelmingly of works of a polemical-conceptual nature, in which – from a constructivist position – the authors analyse and criticise discursive practices widespread in Russian society (see, for example, Karpenko 2002; Malakhov 2007, 2011; Shnirel'man 2008; Regame [Regamey] 2010; Demintseva 2013). These discourses have an alarmist character – employing concepts of ‘territorial ethnic balance’, ‘ethno-cultural safety’, ‘critical share of immigrant population’, ‘ethnic criminality’ and the like – thereby furthering the ethnification of social relations and the growing migrantophobia among the populace.