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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.

This chapter examines Lifetime’s short-lived Russian Dolls and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, a widely watched US reality TV show. Both shows exemplify the emergence of narratives that associate the post-Soviet diaspora with idealized accounts of turn of the twentieth century European immigrant adaptation and upward mobility. While they focus on 1.5 generation immigrant participants, many of whom likely came to the United States as religious refugees, the two shows consistently represent their emerging collective “Russian” identity as just another ethnicized version of pan-European whiteness. Post-Soviet migrant cast members are portrayed as following in the footsteps of idealized and homogenized early European migrants, and they are set in firm opposition to Latina/os. The chapter also examines media commentary surrounding the two shows, interviews with participants, their social media posts, and their participation in a Ukrainian TV show where their identity is differently constructed to highlight migrants’ engagement with growing anti-immigration sentiment and their efforts to establish new collective transnational and diasporic identities, which are not represented on DWTS and Russian Dolls.