Introduction

The Introduction lays out the book’s focus on representations of migration from the former USSR to the United States—in TV shows, memoirs, fiction, and interviews—as responses to the global extension of neoliberalism and as contributions to scholarship on immigration and whiteness. By examining post-Soviet immigrants’ participation in diverse forms of human movement, the book adds a focus on the importance of legal status for accessing segmented US citizenship rights to the prevailing emphasis on the significance of collective group characteristics for immigrant adaptation and transnationalism. The New Immigrant Whiteness explores the emergence of discourses associating post-Soviet migrants with a pan-European whiteness that place them in explicit contrast to nonwhite populations even before their arrival in the United States. The book also examines representations of undocumented post-Soviet migration, analyzes post-USSR immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration from Mexico, and explores parallels between post-USSR and Asian immigrants who are similarly associated with the American immigrant dream of upward mobility. As the book renders members of the post-Soviet diaspora less exceptional from other contemporary arrivals, it creates an agenda for comparative work that addresses ongoing changes in the US ethnoracial hierarchy.