Necropolitics and the Migrant as a Political Subject of Disgust: The Precarious Everyday of Russia’s Labour Migrants

Introduction

I am really afraid, honestly! If you are at war it’s easier – you know where you may be shot or beaten from and how to recognise enemies. But here no – here they are laughing and beating you.

(30-year-old male, three advanced education degrees, Tajik, living in Russia for 10 years)

There is an urgent need to move beyond the biopolitical when considering the everyday lives of irregular migrants. It is clear that in many countries the state, and its attendant media, has moved beyond ideas of controlling the health of migrant populations, be it in camps or restricted health care, for example, and is now actively constructing migrants as ‘the enemy at the gates’ bringing crime, disease, and having the power to destroy traditional cultures (Esses, 2015). This has deep implications for migrants, as it positions them as objects of disgust, upon which the socio-political/economic desires of the powerful can be inscribed. This can take many forms, from placing the blame for the impacts of austerity on ‘the other’ (Carastathis, 2015), to the nefarious actions of employers who seek to exploit every possible advantage in order to maximise profits (Lewis et al., 2014). Central to this issue is the idea that irregular migrants (and often formal migrants) are disposable, given their seemingly endless supply, and, as they operate outside of legal frameworks, that they can be abused with near impunity (Buckley, 2014). They are also disposable in the sense that, as they are placed outside of formal boundaries, there is no imperative to provide health care, ensure safety at work, provide education to family members, or offer any form of legal protection. Thus, we argue that to more fully understand the actions of those with power, there needs to be a deeper engagement with death, through the concept of necropolitics, than currently exists within the literature. Recent events, such as the increasing number of migrants dying while attempting to enter the EU by sea, and the excruciating human rights abuses they endure prior to embarkation, demonstrate the pressing need to theorise the death of migrants (Kassar and Dourgnon, 2014). Death is also central to the EU’s response to the ‘crisis’ with increasing calls for ‘boots on the ground’ to destroy (in every sense of the word) the networks facilitating irregular migration. However, drawing upon Mbembe (2003), necropolitics is not just about death but about those the state deems appropriate to ‘let die’. By developing the framework of ‘letting die’, this paper provides a lens through which other studies can reveal the power and oppression that many migrants face in their daily lives. This framework will enable the development of comparative studies on the issues migrants face in differing contexts/regions, allowing stronger voices to put pressure on states to confront their actions.

Arguing that the abuse of migrants must be viewed through the lens of ‘letting die’ is provocative. However, as the discussions below demonstrate, the raison d’être of Central Asian migrants in Russia from the perspective of the state and the majority of employers, is simply and solely as a socio-economic slave body, both individually and collectively, whose labour is abused so political and economic power can be advanced. Russia has the second highest flow, after the USA, of labour migrants and while there are formal channels that migrants can follow (see Malakhov, 2014, for a broad overview), such as work permits and a patent system, it is almost impossible for a migrant to be fully formal. Through a byzantine rent-seeking bureaucracy the Russian state makes it as difficult as possible to formalise; thus migrants have to cope with the actions of employers and landlords, both of whom wish to operate informally to avoid tax (see Reeves, 2013). Within this nexus human rights abuses are commonplace. These include physical violence, extra-judicial detention, the withholding of salaries leading to penury, the denial of urgent health care, and the emotional stress of family separation and constant fear. Informality also ensures that it is impossible to know how many Central Asian migrants there are in Russia, with estimates ranging from 3–12 million, the majority residing in major cities. Whilst there are some instances of forced migration into Russia, the vast majority are willing migrants, in the sense that they make the journey under their own volition. However, in socio-economic terms there is little choice but to seek work in Russia due to the extremely low salaries, inadequate levels of social protection transfers, and the high cost of essential goods in Central Asia (Tesliuc et al., 2014).

The research upon which this article is based is an extreme case, in terms of both the number of migrants involved and the scale of the human rights abuses endured. Furthermore, Russia is an atypical case study, in the global north, given the form of political economy that has developed there since the Soviet Union’s collapse. When talking about the state, and sovereignty, Russia is characterised by the symbiotic relationship between business and political power that leads to accusations of crony capitalism, high levels of corruption, and a socio-economic imperative that is focused almost solely on profit (Williams et al., 2013). Thus, when the actions of employers are considered, it must be remembered that their practices are enabled by the state, and often they are one and the same. While the severity, and political framework, may not be applicable to other regions, this paper has a global resonance by demonstrating how the explicit state-led construction of migrants as criminal and diseased provides a framework through which human rights abuses can be revealed in less extreme settings. Given the current anti-migrant turn across northern Europe, this is of critical importance. The research took place from 2012 to 2015 and involved in-depth interviews with over 300 migrants from Central Asia working in the Russian cities of Moscow and Kazan. They were approached through existing contacts, the snowball method, chance conversations in shops or on the street, and in some instances through NGOs. The interviews all lasted at least an hour, and took place in the location where the interviewee was most comfortable. Participant observation also played an important role, with such research taking place in supermarkets, on public transport, metro stations, border crossings, and on the street. Migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan were interviewed, but due to space restrictions this paper will not explore in-depth the differences between their experiences. Visual methodologies were also employed, with some interviewees given digital cameras and asked to take images of their daily lives. This proved extremely useful as it gave the authors ‘access’ to living spaces, health care facilities, and work environments which otherwise would have remained hidden. Over 1000 media articles from the leading newspapers and blogs were content-analysed, and further interviews were also conducted in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with the families of migrant interviewees working in in Russia.

To reveal the way in which migrants are viewed as diseased and criminal in Russia, and how this impacts their right to life, the article first brings together the necropolitics literature with the lived experience of irregular migration. This is novel, as by bringing Agamben’s (1998, 2004) work on bare life from the camp to the city, it reveals the threat of death as a banal everyday experience. From this framework the paper then details the rising xenophobia in Russia, and how cultural imaginations of migration are constructed through viewing the migrant as diseased and criminal. Within the constraints of this paper it is impossible to give a full account of xenophobia, and its history in Russia (see Pilkington et al., 2010; Shnirelman, 2011; Umland 2008, 2013; Zuev, 2010, for more in-depth discussions), thus to illustrate the ‘xenophobic turn’ against migrants, the spectacle of the 2013 Mayor of Moscow elections is employed. This election saw the main candidates competing to stigmatise migrants, leading to almost daily attacks against Central Asians in Russia’s subservient media. The article next explores the actual construction of migrants as diseased and/or criminal, and then examines the lived experience of these constructions before moving to its conclusions.

Necropolitics and the Irregular Migrant

Irregular migration is intrinsically linked to death, be it fleeing from a ‘death world’ (Mbembe, 2003) where survival is unlikely due to the genocidal actions of others, the precarious path of migration over land and/or sea, the violent and unhealthy nature of transit camps, and/or the precarious nature of work that many migrants are forced into. There is a significant, and extremely important body of work that explores such issues within the confined spaces of transit and refugee camps, much of which employs Agamben’s concept of bare life as its starting point (Johnson, 2013; Minca, 2015; Minca and Ong, 2015; Ramadan, 2013). The migrant living in such places can be considered to experience bare life, as their everyday life is outside of the norms and laws of the state they reside in. Therefore, they do not have the same right to health care, for example, as citizens, and often living conditions are extremely inhospitable (Davies and Isakjee, 2015). Within such spaces there is an explicit biopolitical imperative, where health is monitored and controlled with the intrinsic assumption that the migrant body is unhealthy. This can either be because the migrant comes from a place with poor health care, and where infectious disease rates are perceived as higher than in the west, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it is assumed that the migrant will partake in behaviours risky to health, and/or pays little attention to their own well-being. This led Agamben (1998: 102) to state that ‘today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West’ and that those within them experience a bare life as they are stripped of all rights. This is obviously linked to Schmitt’s (2008) concept of the state of exception, whereby the state decides who is outside of the law through the suspension of legal rights for certain groups. This is commonly exemplified by the legal suspensions that surrounded the Nazi death camps, the treatment of prisoners in the Guantanamo holding facility, or the suspension of human rights in asylum detention centres, which leads to Elden (2009: 55) stating that ‘the “state of exception” is an extraordinary legal moment’. However, the use of the necropolitics concept, exampled by the experiences of irregular migrants in Russia, demonstrates that the state of exception can be a more banal, everyday, citywide practice, through which people are abused with impunity.

Mbembe (2003: 12) states that ‘to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power’, therefore, to understand the state’s necropolitical actions of exception, the state of siege must be considered. To develop this he considers the bare life of those experiencing colonisation, or regions undergoing exploitative resource extraction, arguing that those with power construct such regions as inhabited by ‘savages’. Such spaces are thus

the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilization’. (Mbembe, 2003: 24)

This, he argues, drawing from Arendt (1973), ennobles those who kill within this space to act in the belief that they are not committing murder as the victim lacks human character. For Mbembe (2003), however, necropolitics is not just about killing but also the sovereign’s decision on those who can be left to die. Using the example of townships under the apartheid regime, he demonstrates how colonial attitudes towards death were continued into the postcolonial period. Here ‘to let die’ refers to how the individual is restricted in their access to health care, safety, legal processes, and defence from aggressors. One way in which this is achieved is through the socio-political construction of the other through ‘cultural imaginaries’, as Mbembe states: ‘These imaginaries gave meaning to the enactment of differential rights to differing categories of people for different purposes within the same space; in brief, the exercise of sovereignty’ (2003: 26). Therefore, there is a need to critically examine the way in which those left to die are culturally constructed by the sovereign, in order that their human rights be held in abeyance. Furthermore, Mbembe’s deep engagement with space enables us to take ideas such as exception and bare life outside of the camp and into the city. To date, within migration studies, such engagements have been limited. Issues of necropolitics are investigated, but more in relation to extra-judicial killings in border regions and/or in camps (see, e.g., Elden, 2014; Morton, 2014) and in cases of death in transit. Issues around access to health care tend to be more focused on the biopolitical elements around access, rather than the wounded lives of those unable to access treatment (see, e.g., Cuadra, 2012; this is not to say such work is not important, but rather it concentrates more on the legislation per se rather than how it is experienced). One example that does make such linkages is Alves’ (2014: 324) examination of necropolitical governance in relation to police-linked death squads in Sao Paulo, arguing that to understand black urban life the ‘spatial formations precisely constituted by black disposability’ must be understood. This reading of necropolitics is crucial for the discussions below, as it is not just the act of killing that shapes urban spaces and networks, but also the permanent threat of violence that subjugates significant percentages of the population. Thus the state of exception is not just confined to the camp, but applies to spaces within cities as well, bounded only by the movements and actions of those condemned to a bare life (see also Smith, 2015; Bishara, 2015; Estevez, 2014).

One body of literature that has engaged more fully with the unbounded spatialities of death is queer necropolitics (cf. Edelman, 2014; Goessett, 2014; Lamble, 2013). Edelman (2014) reveals, for example, how in Washington, DC between 2000–11, only 20 percent of murders of trans feminine people of color were solved, well below the normal 80 percent clearance rates, and that the majority of incidents of violence reported against this group were unsolved and/or not taken seriously. He argues that this arises not just because of the phobias both within society and the police force, but that they are

directly linked to racialized and gendered systems of disregard, and disposability borne out of centuries of the enslavement, genocides, and oppression of American Indians, blacks, and coloured ‘Others’, as well as women, queers, and those gendered ‘Others’. (Edelman, 2014: 176)

Furthermore, he states, transgender people are hyper criminalised and thus their spatialities compromised. For example, any person convicted, or even just ‘known’, to have engaged in sex work can be detained and removed from areas designated ‘prostitution free zones’ regardless of the length of time ago of the conviction or their purpose for entering the area. Thus he notes that it is impossible for some people to walk from work to home in a direct route because of this zoning. Therefore, resonating with Mbembe’s ‘cultural imaginaries’, transgender women are constructed as criminal simply for the act of ‘walking while transgender’, and as a result are placed outside normal legal frameworks. Shakhsari (2014) also confronts the issue of visibility in her study of Iranian transgender migrants waiting in Turkey for resettlement to a third country. While their applications are processed, queer and transgender migrants are often sent to small cities in order to expose locals to ‘difference’, while placing the migrant in danger due to their status as an ‘other’, as Shakhsari (2014: 1012) states:

Queer and trans refugees become the guinea pigs of civilizational projects that measure progress according to neoliberal tolerance for queerness in a desire for proximity to Europeanness. The placement of queer and trans refugees in conservative cities (paradoxical to claims of protection of rights of queer refugees), thus serves to prevent queers from crossing lines of public ‘indecency’ and behaving ‘normal’ in order to avoid tensions in conservative towns.

Unable to legally work, such migrants are forced into informality, a space where rights are, at best, suspended. Thus, as Shakhsari argues, while they formally have rights as asylum seekers, in practice they are offered little protection, thus exposing them to a bare life and the potential violence from others.

While Tyner (2015) argues that within the social sciences there is a growing interest in death, he notes that the majority of the current research is concerned with the technical aspects of non-life, such as organ smuggling, and the bio-logics of life and death (Hannabach, 2013). However, it is argued here that outside of queer necropolitics there is a lacuna in the understanding of the more mundane state practices relating to death (i.e., those outside the actual practices of killing, for example, the war on terror or police brutality). Gilbert and Ponder (2013) do address this in their discussion on the delays in financial support that responders in the 9/11 attacks have endured. Many died prematurely while struggling to pay medical and other bills, and they argue that in effect they were abandoned by the state, invoking Mbembe’s (2003: 40) argument that many populations endure conditions that place ‘upon them the status of living dead’. Therefore, and central to this paper, it can be argued that necropolitics is not just concerned with the violent spectacle but also with the long drawn-out struggles that often result in premature death.

While the examples above – the township, walking while transgender, and 9/11 responders –might seem disparate, they are drawn together by the constructed cultural imaginations about who is worthy of salvation vis-à-vis who should be left to die. This is of crucial importance when considering the irregular migrant’s everyday life, as the cultural inscriptions that are placed upon their body are permanent, condemning them to a bare life within the city where they are seen as superfluous, not worthy of the rights afforded to other citizens. For irregular migrants violence is a constant companion, as Carastathis (2015) discusses in relation to increasing xenophobic attacks in Greece fuelled by state constructions of austerity, but there is also what Mbembe (2003: 21) terms the triple loss; the loss of home, rights over their body, and political status. While in this instance Mbembe is discussing the death worlds of slaves, this has profound resonance, as shown below, with the everyday life that irregular migrants face in Russia. While there are all too many regular instances of death through violence, or workplace negligence, the majority experience a ‘slow death’ whereby they are ‘kept alive’ in order to produce economic value, but in a state which ensures that they are subservient, with the threat of violence an ever-present background spectre. These are exacerbated with the feelings of loss of home and family, the disgust that is placed upon them by the state and media, and the lack of support from almost any political agency.

The Cultural Imagination of Disgust

The Diseased Migrant

Migrants are constructed in the media as bringing disease to Russia; even though HIV infection rates, the most commonly discussed illness, are much lower in Central Asia. For example, the first deputy of State Duma Committee for Ethnic affairs Mikhail Starshinov states that a ‘huge number of migrants have dangerous diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV infection and various “shameful diseases”’, without any statistics to substantiate this assertion (Chernov, 2014). HIV in Moscow is portrayed as an ‘imported disease’ with authorities and doctors blaming migrants for the increasing number of cases (Pichugina, 2012; State Duma, 2013; TV Center, 2013). Adding to the clamour, the Moscow city administration even went as far as wanting to put up adverts telling Russian women not to enter into relationships with Central Asian men ‘as they have HIV’ (Basharova, 2012). In fact, in relation to HIV, statistically the migrant is more at risk by moving to Russia, as within the 15–49-year-old age group, infection rates in Russia are 1.1 percent of the population compared, for example, with 0.4 percent in Kyrgyzstan. Despite such evidence the hysteria led to the passing of laws increasing health screening for migrant workers, with those found to be ill simply deported from the country and infection levels trumpeted in the press. For example, one national newspaper headline highlighted that dangerous diseases had been found amongst migrants in the Kostroma region (Trukhanova, 2014). However, the article showed that this only applied to 30 people out of 2500 migrants screened, which is far below the Russian average for infectious diseases. As usual those found to be ill were deported without treatment. This relates explicitly to Mbembe’s notion of ‘to let die’. One of the ways in which the migrant is constructed as ill is through the criticism of the health care systems in Central Asia (in other words they cannot detect or treat illness there, ergo migrants must be diseased). Therefore, if this is correct, the deportation of the ill migrant to a failing health system is simply to let them die elsewhere. Attempts to stop sexual relations, and thus reproduction, castigates the migrant body even further.

Migrants are also constructed in the media as drunks or drug abusers, lacking in any health education, sexually promiscuous and unable to ‘control’ themselves, therefore putting the native population in grave danger. Within this framework the dominant cultural imagination is of the migrant as a near ‘savage’ figure. Almost all migrant interviewees are aware of such discourses and find them laughable but distressing. It is the former that one migrant explains well here:

When do we have the time and money to drink? I work seven days a week for 14–16 hours a day. I sleep and work, sleep and work… After sending money back [to family back in Tajikistan] I hardly have enough to pay for my bed and some food. (28-year-old man, higher education, Tajik, living in Russia for 6 years)

For the vast majority of interviewees, the aim is to remit enough money home to secure the safety of their families and/or to save enough to bring them to Russia. There is simply no evidence of widespread drinking or drug abuse amongst the migrant community. Furthermore, this is an example of the extreme double standards that exist, as migrants are labelled in such a way by a country with extremely high levels of drug and alcohol problems, violence, and domestic abuse. The discourse is also extremely stressful and upsetting as it reaches families back home; as one interviewee said:

A lot of people back home think we have loads of girlfriends in Moscow and drink all the time. I am sure my wife knows that this does not happen, but at the same time it makes things difficult between us when I am away from home for such a long time. (29-year-old man, higher education, Kyrgyz, living in Russia for 7 years)

Another discourse promulgated by the Russian state in Central Asia is that migrants return with infectious diseases and a lower ‘moral standard’. ⁴ Without doubt the average migrant will return home with a lower level of health, due, however, to their working and living conditions rather than from their perceived risky behaviour. Almost all interviewees working on construction sites discussed how they were exposed to unsafe conditions, with little safety training, poor safety equipment, and overwork. Speaking directly to the concept of ‘letting die’, NGO workers described how if a serious accident occurred in the work place the migrant would often be placed onto the pavement. An ambulance would then be called, but the employer would deny all knowledge of them working there (as they are likely to be paid informally, so there are no records) to avoid having to pay any hospital bills for them. If the injury was serious enough treatment would be provided, but as soon as it was no longer an ‘emergency’ then the migrant would be forced to leave the hospital and any further treatment would have to be paid for. Interviewees also discussed how they are targeted by people selling medical insurance that turns out to be fake and/or extremely expensive. Migrants are extremely afraid of engaging with the formal health service, as they fear that they will be reported to the migration services and deported (for further discussion, see Kuznetsova and Muchyaramova, 2014). As well as self-medicating migrants turn to informal health care provided within their diaspora groups. For example, in one city Kyrgyz doctors were interviewed who were running informal clinics, which, while offering paid services, were cheaper and safer for migrants to use. This, however, stigmatises migrants further as such practices are deemed to simply spread disease more easily.

With regards to health, the migrant experiences the triple loss described by Mbembe: they are away from their home, they have no rights over their body as it is inscribed with disease, and they have no political rights as they are denied health care. Thus ill health becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as their long working hours, poor living conditions, general stress, and lack of health care all combine to wear down the migrant. Furthermore, there is simply no time to be ill. No migrant would receive sick pay, and almost every interviewee said that they would lose their job if they took time off for an illness. All this demonstrates their superfluous existence to the state and employers, who are, respectively, primarily concerned with their political value as ‘the other’ and their potential to be worked to exhaustion.

The Criminal Migrant

Criminality is inscribed onto all Central Asian migrants in Russia. Whereas in other regions of the world, it is broadly accepted that as the body cannot be illegal, it is an oxymoron to label someone an illegal migrant. Rather, following the UNHCR, it is more appropriate to describe someone operating outside of their visa/passport status as an irregular migrant. Such a distinction does not exist in Russia, with the vast majority of analysed newspaper articles describing Central Asian migrants as illegal. This is racist in its construction, as, prior to the onset of the current conflict, Ukrainian labour migrants were not described as such. By delineating legality by skin colour, it is, of course, easy for everyone of that ethnic group to be to be placed into the same category, in this instance that of an illegal migrant. Reinforcing this is the imagery that the media deploys when discussing any aspect of migration. For example, one article discussing the development of formal migration channels between Russia and Kyrgyzstan was juxtaposed with a photograph of migrants with their hands on their heads, pressed up against a police van. Such imageries of power and oppression are common place. After raids on factories, for example, TV news programmes show images of migrants being marched away, again in a pose of surrender, even though they have not been arrested, and many of them will have formal work permits (for an overview, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9pii9qGtSs). The apogee of this was when, after several instances of inter-ethnic unrest (though including between Russian citizens), several thousand Vietnamese workers were rounded up and detained in a makeshift camp, set up in a public place, allowing people to literally walk up to the small barriers and ‘gaze’ on the illegals. While some were deported after several weeks, the majority were allowed to return to work. Given this bombardment of ‘illegal’ imagery it is perhaps no surprise that it becomes embedded in the public consciousness.

The criminal ‘other’ is a standard othering tool in all migrant recipient countries, but in 2013 this went into overdrive in Russia. Moscow became the focal point of this with the overarching discourse built around the frankly ludicrous idea, put forward numerous times by the Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, that the city would be the world’s safest capital if only migrants were not there committing crimes (Izvestia, 2013). Statistics were manipulated, ignored, or dismissed, for example the governor of Ingushetia claimed that ‘one in ten migrants quite possibly did not come to work, and with criminal purposes, including selling drugs’. There is no basis to this at all, note the use of ‘quite possibly’, but as the below sections discuss, such statements become ‘fact’ if they are repeated often enough. And repeated they were. Mikhail Gusakov, head of Moscow Criminal Investigations, states that residents of ‘neighbouring countries’ are the cause of 99% of all crime committed by foreigners in Russia. Yet in his discussions, there is no mention of any crimes committed by Ukrainians, for example, only those by Central Asians (Boyko, 2014). The type of crime ‘committed’ by migrants was also repeatedly highlighted, without any substantiation, with Sobyanin saying that it is not ‘banal theft’ but ‘crimes against life and health’ that are committed by ‘illegal immigrants’ (Nikolaeva, 2013); furthermore, a police spokesman said ‘almost all of the murders, robberies, and rapes are on the conscience of immigrants from the CIS’. Again, similar to health, a link is drawn between the migrants’ status and their actions, with no explanation given about why ‘illegal’ status makes you more predisposed to becoming a violent criminal. The situation is portrayed as worsening all the time, painting a picture of an increasingly lawless and immoral migrant population, with a police spokesman claiming that ‘in the first half of 2013 immigrants made up 40% of crimes compared to the same period last year’. No mention is made of what the previous figure was, or that in the xenophobic climate, migrants were more likely than ever to be arrested; thus artificially increasing the conviction rate amongst this group. Every migrant round up was accompanied in the media with images of migrants forced into stereotypical poses, such as sitting with their hands on their heads, or marching in lines down the streets, no matter that their alleged ‘crimes’ were often administrative rather than criminal. The reality of migrant crime is rather more banal, with the ministry of internal affairs stating that in 2012 foreigners accounted for just 3.8 percent of all convictions in Russia, with about one fourth of all their crimes consisting of the forging of work and residency permits. This is a far cry from ‘50 percent of all crime’, demonstrating that the existing approach of crime statistics in Russia is open to multiple distortions, creating ‘an artificial picture of reality’ (Shkljaruk et al., 2015: 7).

Given this discourse it was no surprise that migrant criminality became a major campaign tool in the Mayor of Moscow election held in 2013. All of the candidates took part in a race to the bottom to demonstrate just how xenophobic they could be towards Central Asian migrants. Sobyanin, as incumbent, repeatedly made statements such as ‘Moscow is a Russian city and it should remain that way. It is not Chinese, Tajik, or Uzbek’ and ‘people who speak Russian badly and who have a different culture are better off living in their own country’. While held up in the West as an antidote to Putin, the prominent blogger and anti-government leader, Alexei Navalny (2013), was particularly vitriolic in his public statements. Given his long standing relationships with nationalist groups, this was not perhaps surprising, but it is astonishing that a serious challenger for the post of mayor of a major world city can make unchallenged statements such as:

From there, they [migrants] commit raids on the nearby districts; they aren’t going to die of starvation if they don’t find work. One can grab a purse in the metro, one can take somebody’s money away in the elevator with a knife.

He also spoke of areas where migrants live as ‘criminal ghettos’ and that ‘people from there commit crimes with impunity’ and in his election manifesto he stated that ‘illegal migration is a petri dish for violence and crime’. He even called for the banning of migrants from using the metro system as ‘they don’t pay taxes’ so thus should not benefit from the state subsidies the system receives. All of the candidates talked of, at least, limiting the number of migrants allowed into Moscow, ignoring the need for low paid labour in the capital, though how they planned to achieve this was always left unclear. During 2013 there were several cases of the ethnic cleansing of markets, with non-Russians banned from working in many areas, and street kiosks, often staffed by migrants, forcibly closed down (Judah, 2013). The logical conclusion to this continual wave of anti-migrant sentiment from politicians, the media, and commentators was the ethnic violence that occurred in Biryulyovo after an ethnic Russian was stabbed to death by an Azerbaijani migrant (see Guillory, 2013, for an overview of the events). After several days of violence, the region’s food market, one of the largest in Moscow, was closed, affecting the employment of many thousands of migrants, and enabling the redevelopment of the market into more profitable spaces – for the landowners. When an Uzbek migrant was murdered in similar circumstances the week after the riots the media barely reported the event.

In Moscow, far right groups began to ‘hunt’ migrants living in informal accommodation (see Salomatin, 2013 for further details and photographic evidence). They would act on tip offs as to where migrants were living, and forcibly enter the space and demand to see passports and documentation. Given that migration officials are the only people allowed to ask for your documents (though officially this is totally ignored), this is clearly against the law; that is, unless there is suspicion that a crime has been committed, which, given that migrants are so intensively constructed as criminals, there is thus a certain illogical logic to their constant stopping by the police. Groups such as ‘Moscow Shield’ stated that they did not employ violence, but their own social media has photographs of them forcibly detaining people and visibly intimidating others. ⁵ They publish photographs of the poor conditions migrants are forced to live in, with the subtext that they are an uncultured subclass. In every instance of such raids the police were in the background waiting to detain migrants. Anyone walking around Moscow will see Central Asian migrants having their documents checked by the police, often resulting in the ‘offender’ been led away (see also Reeves, 2013). On the metro system it is even more conspicuous, with the police often waiting at the top of escalators to intercept migrants. On one occasion, the first author witnessed a scene with seven migrants lined up against a wall while the police office waited for more to stop. Many respondents discussed their experience of document checks. Even if they were carrying every piece of documentation possibly needed by law, they were often asked for a bribe by the police. When stopped, interviewees discussed how the police would ask for labour contracts (for which there is no reason to carry under law), or they would reject the presented documents as fakes in order to extort money. As one interviewee said:

I was stopped in a city centre in Moscow and was asked to present my documents. I showed them my registration, which was made by my landlord through the post […], they said that they don’t see it in their database, I tried to explain, but they did not listen, I put on the table 500 Roubles […] and they let me go. (34-year-old man, from Tajikistan with Uzbek ethnicity, a seasonal worker in Russia since 1998)

During three years in Moscow, the first author did not once witness an ethnic Russian having their documents checked ‘at random’ on the metro (see Voronkov et al., 2011, for further discussion on police discrimination). Furthermore, the spectacle of passport checks reinforces to the public the illegality of migrants (if the police have stopped them they must be doing something wrong). For migrants, being arrested is a traumatic experience. Civil society leaders told the authors, and migrants attested to this as well, that in order to reach arrest quotas, the police will simply detain migrants and attach a crime to them. By constructing the migrant as criminal, it is much easier for the state to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the group. If they are acting illegally, why should the state, they argue, provide any welfare, health care, and/or be interested in work place safety? This obviously places them at risk of ill health and is further evidence of the state’s ‘letting die’ attitude towards this group. It also impacts personal safety, as criminality can be used as an excuse for physical attacks and murder – both of which go under reported and under investigated.

Walking As a Migrant: The Everyday Experiences of Disgust

As a direct result of their demonisation, migrants wish to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Almost all interviewees discussed that when on the street, every effort is made not to make eye contact with ethnic Russians, especially young people or authority figures, for fear that it will lead to conflict. Migrants tend to occupy spaces which are familiar or where there is relative safety in numbers. For example, one migrant, when asked about how they spent leisure time outdoors said:

We just walk around our apartment building. It is safe here as people know us and will not cause trouble. The police rarely come here, so there is little danger of getting picked up or getting hassled. It is not very exciting but it is better to be around people you know. (28-year-old woman, higher education degree, Kyrgyz, living in Russia for 6 years)

Many interviewees mentioned that ethnic clothes often create problems and make them more visible for verbal abuse or attention from police, but sometimes just having a not-Slavic appearance caused problems even if you have a good job and smart clothes:

Recently we went to the post office with my friend Sasha [Russian], he helped me to prepare documents … And there were a lot of people there, and a young woman who works there said to us: ‘hey you, immigrants, you left a paper here’. His father is Uzbek, his mother is Russian, he has a passport. We had good clothes on us, smart clothes … And one old lady was saying as well: immigrants, immigrants… (36-year-old man, Uzbek, living in Kazan for 3 years)

Interviews with leaders of NGOs providing legal support to migrants reveal that the problem of ‘getting picked up’ by the police is a very real one. When in the police station, they are presented with a vast amount of paperwork to sign and are often told, interviewees recounted, that if they signed it all there and then they would soon be released. Feeling pressured, those with poor Russian often unwittingly sign away their rights to legal representation and a translator in court, and are simply found guilty and deported. In other instances people who are detained were told that an informal payment will secure their release. Women interviewees who endured this experience discussed the increasing level of physical threat they felt as their period of detention increased. Often they would have to wait for a partner or friend to finish work (as leaving early would lead to their dismissal) to bring the money needed to secure their release. Migrant interviewees who had been through this process discussed how frightening the ordeal was due to their vulnerability, and many simply pleaded guilty either because they did not understand the charges, or they were threatened with more serious charges. In the vast majority of cases, amongst interviewees, a guilty plea led to rapid deportation. This has a dual benefit for the police, as first, it ‘solves’ a crime and second, it increases the number of migrants deported, which portrays them positively in the crusade against ‘illegal’ migration. If the migrant is fortunate, then they are returned to their country, from where they can plan how to re-enter Russia. However, during the research, numerous instances were discussed whereby deportees were held indefinitely in transit camps until a payment was made for their release. In the most extreme cases people were detained long term, without their family receiving notification, so the authorities could link the arrest to the war against extremism by holding long term prisoners. Thus it is not surprising that migrants stay away from heavily policed areas in order to decrease the chance of arrest. Further areas of the city have become off limits because of the high risk of violence there, with little chance of help from the police if they are attacked:

The endpoints of subways – Khimki, Teply Stan, Shelkovskaya, Domodedovo, Vikhino – these are the ultra boundary places! Where God forbid, Allah forbid to go there after 8–9 pm. […] if I was to be attacked the police laugh from a distance! I cannot rely on them. They [the attackers] could kill me but police would never try to save me. (30-year-old man, Tajik, living in Russia for 10 years)

While migrants are constructed en masse as uncultured, uneducated, and unable to speak Russian, this is simply not true. One NGO recorded the education status of those turning to it for help and over half had completed a higher education. Amongst interviewees, it was common for people to have degrees, yet be working as cleaners with no chance of working in their profession. There is no such thing as job security, and working hours are almost always above legal limits. One interviewee discussed how she had to hire someone to undertake her work while she was in an informal clinic receiving treatment for several hours a day. Travel to the clinic takes a long time, as she uses the bus rather than the metro to avoid the police, and after she has finished she returns to work. As she says, taking one day off sick would cause her to lose her job. As is the case with almost all migrants, she receives no holiday pay, which makes it extremely difficult for her to visit her young children back in Tajikistan. All of this demonstrates the attitudes of employers towards migrant labour, as a supply that can be worked to exhaustion. Anyone who is unable to work is cast aside ‘to die’. Overall, migrants are forced to walk the city in a form of bare life as they are operating in a state of exception within which the rules set out by the sovereign do not apply to them. As Mbembe (2003: 21) argues, ‘the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow’. Migrants are forced to live in a shadow status, as similar to the observations of Edelman (2014) in relation to walking as transgender, the migration body has so much disgust heaped upon it, that hate crimes against them are justifiable by those carrying them out.

Conclusions

This article has put forward the notion of necropolitics, as developed by Mbembe (2003), as a framework for understanding the actions of the state in relation to migrants through their portrayal as diseased and criminal. Necropolitics, in this reading, is not just about death, be it violent or otherwise, but as Mbembe argues, it is more centred around the idea of ‘to let die’ and to injure almost to the point of death. This can be seen clearly by the way in which migrants are constructed as diseased, and not to be touched, but not worthy of treatment by the health care system. Furthermore, while constructing the migrant as criminal might not seem at first glance to be linked to death, it adds another layer of disgust onto the migrant body. Thus the body’s ‘criminality’ negates further the need for protection and lays it open to attack. Without doubt, Russia’s major cities can be read as spaces of exception for migrants as they are simply placed outside of the legal framework. Besides the problems this causes for the individual, it has broader implications for the agency of diaspora groups. While, as Ramadan (2013) argues, within the migrant camp individuals and networks can develop agency and are thus not passive actors, the scale of the issues migrants face in the unbounded city make it extremely difficult for them to develop meaningful forms of resilience and/or resistance.

Russia is an extreme example of the human rights abuses that migrants face, due to the scale of the migration, the corrupt form of political economy that has developed in the country, and the underlying xenophobia that exists within the country. However, by shining a light on the ways in which migrants are constructed as diseased and criminal, much is revealed about the actions, priorities, and desires of the state and entrepreneurs. By revealing and developing this framework, it can be employed to note such practices in countries where the abuse of migrants is on a smaller scale or is more hidden. It is essential to remove such obscurifications if we, as a body of academics and/or NGOs, wish to improve the rights and lives of migrants through our research. Given the recent rise of xenophobic discourses in western Europe as a form of sovereign building, and the death worlds many migrants face themselves (in transit by sea for example), the need to reveal the realities is of increasing importance. Given the form of neo-liberalism that has emerged through austerity, such as the removal of workers’ rights in general and not just for migrants, the securitisation of borders, diminishing welfare, etc., the issue/scale of migrant abuse is not one which is going to be reduced in the immediate future, and is one which must be confronted.