Chapter 3 focuses on political mobilizers of welfare nationalism, mainly popular attitudes toward welfare deservingness, and agents that mobilized anti-immigrant politics. The chapter elaborates on four types of deservingness criteria for migrants; need or vulnerability, ethnic closeness, contributions to receiving states’ economies and to their national security. It argues that societal norms for outsiders’ deservingness have narrowed in both Europe and Russia. Populist parties, anti-immigrant, and Euroskeptic are shown to be key mobilizers of welfare nationalism, abetted by anti-immigrant mass media. The chapter tracks one major populist party each in Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Poland, showing how that party gained vote share and national influence by opposing the CEE and MENA migrations. Using party programs and electoral outcomes, it shows how populists reinforced and amplified welfare nationalist grievances in societies, channeling them into electoral success and pressures for exclusionary migration policies. In authoritarian Russia, popular grievances against migrants are shown to be similar to grievances in Europe, but welfare nationalism was mobilized by regional elites, governors, and mayors. The chapter draws on arguments about authoritarian elites’ motivations to respond to popular grievances in order to explain how sub-national leaders used anti-immigrant mobilization for political advantage in Russia’s hybrid regime.

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 1 lays out the book’s argument about the rise and sources of welfare nationalism. It explains the significance of the study in focusing on migration issues that are major sources of contemporary political and humanitarian crises and shows ‘how we got here’ – how these crises have built since the 1990s in Europe and Russia. The chapter explains the book’s key concepts: welfare nationalism, exclusion and inclusion, and populism, and sets the study within the literature on international migration and welfare. It focuses on the key role of ethnicity and the importance of political elites and mass media in influencing responses to migration and identifies contrasting cycles: Exclusionary migrations involve a “vicious cycle” of hostile public opinion toward more-or-less ethnically distant migrants that is reinforced and exploited by politicians for enhanced influence, amplified by mass media, and produces policies of exclusion. By contrast, inclusionary migrations involve a “virtuous cycle” of relatively receptive public opinion toward ethnically close migrants, high-level political support, elites’ management of nationals’ grievances, and positive treatment in mass media, producing policies of inclusion. The conclusion provides an overview of the book’s structure and a summary of each chapter.

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.