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Russia is the world’s fourth top migration destination. While most migrate to Russia from other post-Soviet countries, a small but highly visible group of the Russian-speaking diaspora has migrated from Europe and North and South America. Lauded in Russian media as “ideological migrants,” the Kremlin claims that they flee liberalism and oppression by the transnational elite. This presentation by Professor Lauren Woodard asks, what really motivates their migration?

Professor Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and on transnational and transracial adoption. Briggs’ most recent book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press, 2020), examines the 400-year-old history of the United States’ use of taking children from marginalized communities—from the taking of Black and Native children during America’s founding to the Donald Trump’s policy of family separation for Central American migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border—as a violent tool for political ends.

It is possible to identify gendered disadvantage at almost every point in a migrant woman’s journey, physical and legal, from country of origin to country of destination, from admission to naturalization. Rules which explicitly distribute migration opportunities differently on the grounds of sex/gender, such as prohibitions on certain women’s emigration, may produce such disadvantage. Women may also, however, be disadvantaged by facially gender-neutral rules.