A Cage for Outsiders: The Image of the Migrant in Legal Perception and Among Migration Policy Actors in the Russian Far East

Abstract

This article reveals the mechanism whereby the symbolically charged image of the “other” is transformed into a set of legal restrictions that construct a normative-symbolic space of exclusion. The authors investigate the mismatch between the statistically insignificant scale of foreign migration in Russia’s Far Eastern regions and the intense legal and media “struggle” against it, proposing this dichotomy as the core of an emerging migration legal order—“a cage for outsiders”. The empirical base includes an analysis of federal and regional legislation, judicial practice 2022–2025, and an array of sociological data: non-formalized interviews with residents of Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, and Birobidzhan, as well as materials from regional online media from mid-2023 to early 2025. This interdisciplinary corpus enables a comparison of official legal doctrine with the discursive fears circulating in the public sphere. The architecture of the contemporary migration regime is reconstructed: juridical and politico-administrative models of restriction are identified, a typology of legal constraints is proposed (jurisdictional, compensatory, inclusive, expulsive), and it is demonstrated how the “the cage for outsiders” is transformed into a legal instrument of selection and stigmatization.