Abstract
<jats:p>The article analyzes the discourse on migrants as a form of political discourse. The authors focus on the process through which a social group of migrants, initially not perceived in political terms, is endowed with a set of political meanings. The case on the basis of which this process is considered is the formation and transformation of the semantic complex denoted by the term “foreign migrant” within the territorial community of the Russian Far East in the postSoviet period. The article describes how the concept of the “yellow peril,” present in the Russian political discourse since the imperial period, was reproduced and transformed in relation to new migrants from the People’s Republic of China in the 1990s, becoming an important element of the regional identity. The authors demonstrate how and why, following a decline in the flow of Chinese migrants, this semantic complex was extended to a new ethno-social group, which was incorporated into the political discourse as a hostile “other”. They also trace the mechanism through which political meanings are attributed to a group that initially lacked political salience. The empirical basis of the study consists of three series of unstructured interviews with residents of the Khabarovsk Region conducted at different stages of the post-Soviet period, as well as materials from the most popular and authoritative regional online media outlets. In addition, the authors draw on scholarly works examining migrant discourse in the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods and analyzing the representation of migrants in post-Soviet federal media.</jats:p>