 Producing state capacity through corruption: the case of immigration control in RussiaCaress Schenk Post-Soviet Affairs, 2021, vol. 37, issue 4, 303-317 Abstract: Immigration control in Russia, one of the world’s top five largest immigrant-receiving countries, is rife with corruption and other informal practices. Instead of framing corruption simply as bad governance, this article shows that informal strategies are intertwined with formal state practices to produce immigration control. Instead of presenting corruption as subversive of state institutions and contradictions between formal and informal practices as a signal of system dysfunction, I argue that state actors’ simultaneous formal and informal activities can work together towards a perhaps surprisingly coherent set of goals. Drawing on ethnographic work with migrants and legal-institutional analysis of Russia’s migration sphere, this article demonstrates how felt immigration control, or the experience of migrants, combines legal and informal strategies that center on coercion. It shows how coercive interactions between migrants and state agents produce visible data and media images that are projected to the public as immigration control. Date: 2021 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rpsaxx:v:37:y:2021:i:4:p:303-317 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/1060586X.2021.1955325 Access Statistics for this article Post-Soviet Affairs is currently edited by Timothy Frye More articles in Post-Soviet Affairs from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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