IgorLeonov
Building projects. Studying trust. Writing about people and institutions.
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My story
Journalism, project building and research as parts of one professional story.
Research
Professional identity, institutional trust, migration, media and culture. Individual and collaborative work with bibliographic records and access to texts.
Projects and institution building
Ideas given organizational form: historical initiatives, active projects and lines of development.
Journalism and public writing
Editorial essays, public commentary and contemporary journalism, from migration policy to trust in documents and digital environments.
Books and long-form projects
Journalism and research experience brought into literary public-interest writing.
Quotes and ideas
Statements from public commentary, research and historical publications. Joint authorship is retained for collaborative works.
What I am working on
Developing projects and research questions, with their current stages rather than promised outcomes.
Questions about me and my work
Brief answers grounded in the biography, projects and publications.
Contact and collaboration
Research, interviews, publications and civic projects.
Sources and documentary memory
Biographical records, public research entries and archival evidence of the projects’ history.
The U.S. Asylum System Amid Heavy Border Workloads, FY2021–FY2024
An interagency analysis of backlogs, processing times and administrative capacity. The study relates border workloads to the ability of USCIS and immigration courts to process cases.
Humanitarian Protection Is Not Immigration Selection: Why the United States Needs Both
An examination of the different purposes of protection from persecution and employment-based immigration selection, and how both can concern the same person while retaining distinct eligibility standards.
Recognition of Foreign Qualifications and Migrant Labor Market Integration
A comparison of Germany, Canada and the United States: qualification recognition, licensing and the use of professional experience. This site carries the revised preprint dated September 11, 2026.
Inside Border Detention: Observing Migration Motives at the U.S.–Mexico Border
Retrospective observations alongside administrative evidence. The work distinguishes recollection, inference, verified information and established findings.
Cinema as a Cultural Language of Migration: Visual Narratives, Identity Construction, and Social Adaptation
How cinema makes loss, memory, belonging and adaptation understandable. The study connects migration with cultural ways of representing human experience.
Trust without Familiarity: Institutional Judgment in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
How institutions decide about people they cannot fully know. The work examines incomplete evidence, persuasive representations and responsibility for institutional judgments.
When Everyone Pays the Price: Collective Reputation and the Spread of Distrust in Professional Communities
Why one person’s conduct can affect an organization, a profession and people uninvolved in the event. Journalism and professional verification receive particular attention.
Institutional Fear and Self-Censorship as Mechanisms of Social Adaptation in Highly Regulated Political Systems
An analysis of fear and self-censorship as recurring forms of adaptation to administrative uncertainty, selective enforcement and digital observability.
RUPASS as a Non-State Professional Identification System: Institutional Trust Formation and Administrative Resistance in a High-Regulation Migration Regime
A qualitative analysis of a practical institutional experiment, connecting the experience of RUPASS with trust, professional recognition and administrative constraints.
Amerpass as a Non-State System of Transnational Professional Identification: Conceptual, Institutional and Ethical-Legal Foundations
A conceptual model for preserving and presenting professional identity across countries and institutions, emphasizing documentary coherence, context and verification of experience.
Algorithmic Visibility and Institutional Trust: Structural Limitations of Digital Professional Platforms in the Transnational Context
Why digital visibility does not ensure institutional trust. The work examines fragmented professional biographies and the limits of platform-based self-presentation.
Institutional Trust in Multilingual Public Communication: Consistency, Answerability and Migrant Reliance on Government Information
Consistency across languages and responsibility for government information. The work considers the conditions under which migrants can reasonably rely on public communication.
Amerpass Foundation
A U.S. nonprofit connecting migrant support, research, education, independent media and cultural initiatives.
Amerpass
A continuation of the idea of professional continuity: preserving a coherent history of work, experience and achievement across countries and institutional settings.
RUPASS / RU PASS
An early non-state initiative to organize and present migrants’ professional experience. Its history informed later research on trust and recognition.
Russian Migration / Russkaya Migratsiya
Long-term journalism and publishing on migration policy, labor mobility, migrant communities and the consequences of administrative decisions.
INDEMIR
A research and civic line concerning demography, migration, regional development and professional mobility.
Legal Lessons for Migrants
The educational film How to Work in Russia without Problems and accompanying materials for labor migrants from CIS countries.
Igor Leonov Educational Center
A historical educational initiative listed among the founders of Russian Migration magazine.
KPUNews / MXNews
A contemporary continuation of journalism and publishing. KPUNews carries Leonov’s bylined articles and is published by Amerpass Foundation.
InternAcademia / IJIR
An interdisciplinary publishing platform carrying Leonov’s work on professional identification and collective reputation.
Za ravnoudalennost!
Public-interest writing from the author’s historical journalism corpus. The link opens the bibliographic issue archive.
Za derzhavu obidno
An editorial essay retained in the magazine’s issue contents, with the surrounding publication context.
Institutional Trust and Document Verification in Immigration Cases
On the right to ask questions and examine the basis of trust.
Trust without Familiarity
On institutional decisions about people who cannot be fully known, and the role of artificial intelligence.
Author’s blog
Migration policy, independent journalism, bureaucracy and professionalism: a historical author archive.
The Paper Person
How Institutions Turn Human Lives into Documents
Trust should never require a person to surrender the right to ask questions.
Trust should never require a person to surrender the right to ask questions.
A platform shows information, but not always its institutional meaning.
A platform shows information, but not always its institutional meaning.
Institutions make decisions about people they can never fully know.
Institutions make decisions about people they can never fully know.
…a lack of information about their rights.
…a lack of information about their rights.
Professional continuity
Developing Amerpass: coherent professional biographies, supporting records and the presentation of experience across borders and institutions.
Life in Waiting
A qualitative research collaboration with Maksym Domashov on prolonged legal uncertainty and its everyday consequences. Stage: research development.
Orphaned Digital Archives
A collaboration with Maksym Domashov on journalistic material after a newsroom closes. Working version 0.1, August 28, 2026.
The Paper Person
A book in progress about how institutions turn a life into a documentary representation, combining public-interest writing with scenes, humor and irony.
INDEMIR
Demography and migration research and civic initiatives; role follows the author’s CV.
RUPASS
Beginning of the non-state professional identification initiative.
Journalism and publishing
Russian Migration and Russkaya Migratsiya. Editorial roles varied across periods.
RUPASS public presentation
September 12: presentation of the Migration Passport of a Specialist, reported in the press.
Legal education
International educational film and materials for labor migrants; presentation in Bishkek.
Cultural and civic connections
Participation in a conference on the Russian language in the U.S. and the Captain of the Earth festival.
Amerpass Foundation
Founding of the U.S. nonprofit foundation.
Research program
Research on trust, professional identification, migration, public communication and artificial intelligence.