Regional features of migrants’ treatment (the case of the Tomsk and Vladimir Regions)

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of attitudes toward ethnic migrants in two Russian regions: the Tomsk and Vladimir Regions. Its relevance is associated with a high migration influx of foreign citizens into various Russian regions. According to the UN data (2015), our country is the third in the world in terms of the migrants’ influx. Moreover, there is no reliable and comparable sociological information both about the attitude of the local population to them and about the factors that determine it. Against the backdrop of a growing trend of interethnic tension in relations with migrants, the results of such studies acquire important social and political significance. This article relies on the results of representative questionnaires of the population of the Tomsk (in 2014, 563 respondents) and Vladimir Regions (2015, 500) using the general methodology. In the process of research, groups with different levels of tolerance towards migrants were identified in the “host community”. Subsequently, different groups of tolerance of the population were compared in these two regions. The findings show that the attitude towards migrants in the regions can vary even under similar economic conditions and within the framework of a uniform political situation. Significant differences were found in the size of groups that showed varying degrees of tolerance towards migrants. While in the Tomsk Region, the half of the sample can be attributed to the group of the tolerant people, in the Vladimir Region, their percentage is equal to the xenophobes’. The structure of attitudes towards migrants presents particular interest: for the Tomsk Region, the difference between educational and labor migrants is more significant. The obtained results actualize the issue of factors differentiating attitudes towards migrants in different regions of one country. Based on the results obtained, the authors propose a hypothesis that the specificity of the local urban social and cultural context can occupy an important place among these factors. Therefore, in Tomsk (an educational center), there is an obviously higher level of tolerance towards migrants. The authors speak for additional studies using qualitative methods to test their hypothesis.