Russia, China, and the immigration security dilemma.

The "yellow peril" is rising.... We see the overpopulation of the neighboring nation. They will come here, give birth to multitudes of slit-eyed people and then claim political autonomy.... Even if we shoot and kill a million Chinese a year, this problem won't go away.

--Vitalii Poluyanov, Chieftain, the Ussuri Cossack Army, interview with the first author, Vladivostok, June 1, 1999

Since the opening of the Sino-Soviet border in 1988, governors of Siberian and Russian Far Eastern territories, Russian federal government officials, and the media have been warning the Kremlin and the Russian public about "peaceful Chinese infiltration" and "Sinification" of the Russian Far East (RFE). (1) In national polls conducted by the Levada Analytical Center, Russia's leading survey agency, the number of respondents who wanted to restrict the settlement of ethnic Chinese in Russia rose from 39 percent to 46 percent from 2004 to 2005. (2) Resembling responses to migration in host societies from California to the suburbs of Paris--and nurturing premonitions that the French urban riots of late 2005 may repeat themselves at the juncture of Eurasia's two most powerful states--these dire warnings and exclusionist sentiments have been counterintuitive in several important respects. Migrants have been associated with threats to group and national security precisely where they are much needed to offset the decline of the working-age population and to revitalize local economies. Moreover, hostility emerged despite the widely recognized willingness of migrants to work harder and for longer hours in lower-paid jobs than host populations do and to move where workers are scarcest. (3) Alarmist reactions have also persisted regardless of the decline in illegal migration rates from the early 1990s to the present, and regardless of the fact that for over more than a decade, migration has not produced any sizeable Chinese ethnic enclaves in the RFE. (4) Finally, the tenacity of anti-Chinese sentiments in the region has been impervious to the improvement of Sino-Russian relations in the 1990s--as marked by the settlement of border disputes, regular summit meetings, substantial arms trade, and a friendship treaty. (5) These puzzles about the persistence of "yellow peril" alarmism in the RFE relate to a broader theoretical problem identified in a recent review of research on migration and conflict: "Whether migration heightens tensions ... often depends on whether it is viewed as undermining national security or domestic harmony, but the process by which threats are constructed and by which boon is transformed into bane remains poorly understood and under-theorized." (6) In this article, we develop a theoretical explanation of antimigrant alarmism and hostility by drawing on the security dilemma perspective, especially as it applies to relations among ethnic groups. (7)

At the heart of the security dilemma is a desire for self-preservation strongly associated with the absence or decline of central government authority. (8) According to John Herz's original definition: "Whenever such anarchic society has existed--and it has existed in most periods of known history on some level--there has arisen what may be called the 'security dilemma' of men, or groups, or their leaders. Groups or individuals living in such a constellation must be, and usually are, concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated or annihilated by other groups and individuals." (9) Thus, threats blown out of seemingly rational proportion would nevertheless have solid bases in social reality and human psychology. Regarding ethnic relations, the security dilemma refers to obsession with relative power "when proximate groups of people suddenly find themselves newly responsible for their own security." (10) Emphasizing the critical role of perception and misperception during periods of uncertainty, the security dilemma provides an internally consistent and parsimonious explanation for precisely why fears may arise and become endemic, pervasive, irrational, symbolic, exaggerated, and potentially uncontrollable, even in the face of a stated commitment to peace and cooperation by all groups or states. In this sense, the security dilemma directly addresses the central theoretical puzzle of the present study--the emergence and persistence of what may be called "migration phobia," even when migration yields net economic benefits, when most migrants are temporary, and when intergovernmental relations between migrant-sending and -receiving states improve. And because the security dilemma logic has to do with competing interpretations of the nature, scale, and outcomes of migration, we define migration broadly as the movement of people--permanent or temporary-from one country or locality to another. (11)

As cross-border movement of ethnically heterogeneous groups, migration is one process that would make various groups proximate and potentially insecure. First, the very fact of migration could be perceived as a symptom of "borderlessness" and, hence, of declining state sovereignty and government authority. And by raising uncertainty about the future ethnic makeup of states (regardless of actual migration scale), migration would make incumbent ethnic groups more likely to view competition for power as key to their security. Second, ethnic incumbents could rarely be certain that temporary migrants would return home and would not settle down, bring in their relatives and friends, and claim jobs, resources, or territory (that is, "offense" is indistinguishable from "defense"). Histories of territorial claims and records of violent conflict between the migrants and the host populations would also decrease credibility of the migrants' intent. Third, migration often brings together ethnic populations who have a sense of distinct "groupness" and entrenched negative stereotypes--giving xenophobic politicians opportunities to manipulate ethnic mythologies in the struggle for power. Fourth, migration may engender economic rivalries and competition, activating the sense of economic vulnerability in host societies. The more intense these perceptions--the "security dilemma complex"--the more would one expect migration to engender fear and hostility despite efforts of all groups to assert their good will.

However, Jack Snyder and Robert Jervis caution that the security dilemma is "a social situation with social and perceptual causes, not simply a fact of nature. None of the elements that fuel the security dilemma--neither anarchy, nor offensive advantages, nor expectations that others will defect--can be taken for granted as unproblematic givens." (12) Actual or anticipated shifts in ethnic balance would not automatically harden into security dilemma situations, even in near-anarchical environments. Individual fears of ethnic "other" newcomers may differ widely in the same fear-producing environments. In two areas of the world in which interethnic security dilemma conditions have been most apparent--Africa and the former Soviet Union--violent conflict occurred in only a fraction of interethnic dyads. (13)

Whereas previous research on the interethnic security dilemma has offered us increasingly sophisticated theoretical refinements, empirical studies have relied on descriptive case studies--in which mass violence had already occurred. (14) However, such methodology is insufficient to address critical questions about the long-term social and psychological dynamics of ethnic conflict that concern us in this study: How do perceived shifts in ethnic population balances translate into fear and hostility toward ethnic "others" long before incendiary speeches are written and guns are fired? Do threat perceptions actually emerge among living, breathing human beings under structural conditions and leaders' behavior that one associates with the security dilemma as specified by theory? Under these same conditions, do some individuals find their futures more threatening than do others, and why? Which perceptions may mitigate fears? To address these questions--in a way previous studies could not do by design--we focus on the RFE as a case where no mass interethnic violence had occurred as a result of migration, yet where antimigrant alarmism and hostility have been palpable. We analyze migration phobia with a hope to advance our understanding of the security dilemma logic, before governments actually break down and violence erupts, by systematically testing its claims with large-N, individual-level data for the first time. (15)