Chapter 4 focuses on labor migration from Central Asia to Russia as the first exclusionary migration cycle. Growing migration after 2000 made Russia one of the world’s major migrant-receiving states. The chapter explains why Putin retained a visa-free regime with the much poorer former Soviet states of CA, allowing millions of their citizens free entry to Russia, where most stayed and worked with undocumented status. As the numbers of the ethnically distant Muslim migrants rose, welfare nationalist grievances emerged in the cities and regions where migrants were concentrated. Citing public opinion surveys, speeches by mayors and governors, election and party platforms, and mass media, the chapter shows how politicians framed and used welfare nationalist discourses to placate citizens and scapegoat migrants for declines in popular welfare. It highlights the role of sub-national officials in mobilizing anti-immigrant politics and channeling pressures for exclusionary policies to Putin. These pressures produced legislative and normative changes that progressively excluded migrant families from social sectors and subjected workers to increasing abuses, including deportations and other forms of exclusion. A sub-set of migrants who contributed to Russia’s national security were treated as more deserving.

Chapter 2 expands on economic drivers of welfare nationalism, the long-term structural trends that produced a “toxic mix of immigration and austerity,” which in turn drove exclusion of migrants in Europe and Russia after 2000. It identifies causes for the post-1990 explosion of international migration in both regions: the collapse of communist governments, rapid expansion of the European Union, and multiple crises in the Middle East and North Africa. The motivations and scale of the three major exclusionary migrations to Europe and Russia are covered. The chapter then turns to structural decline of labor markets and welfare states over recent decades. It tracks growing labor precarity s because of increases in non-standard and informal employment, growing exclusion of nationals from social insurance systems, and welfare state retrenchment. The 2008 global financial crisis, the 2011 Euro Crisis, and the recessions in Russia after 2012 are shown to further drive austerity. The chapter connects nationals’ welfare losses with grievances and appeals that are prominent in welfare nationalist discourse. . Declines in social security and welfare of nationals are shown to affect politics, alienating European electorates from mainstream parties and leaving postcommunist societies disillusioned with the West.