Migration and Crime in Russia: Empirical Assessment of Media Discursive Framing

The representation of migrants in media space and political rhetoric is often built around the narrative of “threat” and associated with an increase in crime rates within host states. At the same time, a number of foreign studies refute the existence of a strong link between the scale of migration and the level of criminal activity. Such research findings raise the question of whether migrants really do influence the growth of crime in Russia in one way or another, or whether such attitudes are merely the result of a discursive construction in the information space. The aim of the study is to empirically verify the relationship between the level of migration processes and the level of crime in Russian regions and to determine how the media shape the image of migrants in the criminal context. The research methodology includes two stages. First, based on official statistics from Rosstat and the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for 2010-2022, a panel regression with fixed effects was constructed to assess the impact of migration levels on crime, taking into account socio-economic factors. The control variables for the regression analysis in the paper are the level of poverty, unemployment and urbanization. Second, the paper studied media discourse in Telegram news channels using the methods of critical discourse analysis and content analysis. More than 300 thousand messages containing ethnic markers and references to migrants in the context of offenses were analyzed. The results of the study have shown that migration, when taking into account socio-economic factors, does not have a statistically significant impact on the crime rate in the regions of the Russian Federation. The main factors affecting the criminogenic situation are socio-economic conditions and regional unevenness of development. At the same time, there is a persistent negative image of migrants with a bright ethnic coloring in the information space. Thus, the criminalization of migrants in the Russian public space does not correlate with the actual statistics. This, in turn, points to the need to rethink both media strategies and attitudes towards migration policy.