Chapter 7 turns to ethnic return migrations, Russia’s Compatriot Resettlement Program and the Poland’s Karta Polaka (Pole’s Card) program. In these cases migrants entered ‘virtuous inclusionary cycles’ : societies were receptive to them as co- ethnics, political elites sponsored and financed their resettlement and media, mostly state-controlled in both states, lauded their contributions. The chapter analyzes the motives of the Polish and Russian governments in sponsoring re-settlers, including demographic replacement for declining populations, workers to fill labor shortages, and symbolic nationalist political agendas. It shows that welfare nationalist grievances did emerge over the resetlers’ social privileges and nationals’ competition with them for scare social resources. There were also disputes over the boundaries of national belonging. In sharp contrast to the exclusionary migrations, Russian and Polish political elites managed and mitigated grievances rather than mobilizing them for political gain. Resettlers confronted obstacles to integration: severe restrictions on residence and job rights in Russia, limited language fluency in Poland. Still, inclusionary policies gave resettlers social, economic and civil rights denied to those in exclusionary migrations.

This chapter examines how the electoral victories of the populist Law and Justice Party in Poland were followed by legal changes dismantling institutional checks on government and eroding a number of individual civil and political rights, including freedom of speech and assembly. This case study tends to show that there is a dynamic built into illiberal populism that eventually renders it antithetical to democratic rules of the game.