Visiting Prague

Currently more than 280,000 foreigners live in Czech Republic. The majority of foreigners working here are coming from eastern countries: Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland and Russia. There are also communities of Vietnamese, Greeks, Armenians, Americans and Uzbeks living in this country. Based on research of the Statistics Office of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs of the Czech Republic, foreign communities are continuing to grow for the past 10 year, due to different economic and political reasons. These many communities supply Czech labor market with much skilled and unskilled multilingual recourse. They also enrich cultural diversity of the Republic. After the Czech Republic became a member of the European Union, there has also been a noticeable influx of citizens of EU countries.

Based of official data, the largest group of foreigners living and working in the Czech Republic comes from Ukraine. Ukrainians are commonly heard on construction sites or similar areas of the job market. Ukrainians are primarily seasonal workers and many of them come to the Czech Republic for short term periods. Since they are usually relatively cheap to employ, Ukrainians have become a highly employable work force for Czech labor market. Many Ukrainians come to the Czech Republic to work in jobs involving manual labor, and typically they send earned money to their families back home. Some Ukrainians come here to pursue an education or to gain professional work experience.
The second largest foreign community in the Czech Republic is from neighboring Slovakia. Obviously Slovaks have many advantages over other foreigners coming here. There is almost no language barrier, the economies of Czech and Slovak, former united country Czechoslovakia, are pretty similar. Moreover both countries have shared culture, traditions and not that recent history.
Greater part of Slovaks, in Czech Republic, come/came to receive higher education. After graduation and establishing a network of friends, many of them prefer to stay to find a job and establish a career. Thanks to an advantageous process making it easy to obtain permanent residence and citizenship, many Slovaks did actually come to the Czech Republic long before both countries joined the European Union. And though they still speak Slovak and identify themselves as Slovak, Czech people do not often consider Slovaks living here as foreigners.
Third largest registered foreigner community in Czech Republic are the Vietnamese. In contrast to Ukrainians they come to country to live permanently, most of the time with their whole families. Majority of Vietnamese are looking for stable income and strive to have enough earnings to send their children to Czech schools and universities. Vietnamese vegetable markets and grocery stores are getting common within the country. They have also been noticed working in other sales industries, i.e. selling consumer electronics, shoes and textile.
Communities of foreigners from Eastern Europe and Asia are not the only ones who come to live and work in the Czech Republic. An easy cross-border entry policy makes it easy now for the citizens of the European Union to come to work here. Workforces from the United Kingdom and Germany sum up the largest number of EU citizens working in the Czech Republic. Since the local markets are relatively close to each other, the western neighbors of the Czech Republic have found a strong market for their goods and services.
Besides European citizens, there are many Japanese living and working in the Czech Republic. Mainly due to operation and construction of several large Japanese manufacturing plants. There are also a number of Americans who making a living here.
Communities of ethnic Armenians (around 12,000) live in modern Czech Republic. There was no previous history of Armenian community in the region and the current one entirely consists of recent immigrants. Many of them have come after the collapse of the Soviet Union, others fleeing poor economic conditions in the Armenian Republic. Armenian Community is noticeably growing one. Armenian Saturday School in Prague was opened in 1996. Some time later Armenian Cultural Center and a Armenian Newspaper were established in the country. Armenian migrants freely speak Russian language, which may make it easier for them to communicate with locals, and those of the older generation.
Germans in the Czech Republic form not a community, but a minority of the residents in such areas like Bohemia, Moravia, and, Czech Silesia. Most of them are Czech citizens, but do declare German ethnicity. Most of them are descendants of those Sudeten Germans who were not expelled after World War II. At those times Germans had a great pressure to assimilate to general Czech society and in a result, many members of this group, especially the younger generation, are now completely assimilated.
Greeks represent another influential minority in Czech Republic. Many Greek people arrived in Czechoslovakia when the Greek Civil War broke out in late 1940’s. In total more than 12,000 Greeks immigrated to Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1950.Today, there are about 7000 Greeks in the country, mostly in the big towns of the Moravian- Silesian Region
The most concentrated linguistic minority in the Czech Republic are ethnic Poles. Historically Poles were majority, but today they constitute about 10% of the Karviná and Frýdek-Místek districts population. Actually Poles have the right to use their language in official dealings, the public media (the Czech TV and the Czech Radio) regularly broadcast in Polish, and there are many Polish primary and secondary schools in the area. The Polish minority stated to decrease after WWII, because it became very difficult to obtain education in Polish. Czech authorities did not allow bilingual signs to maintain Polish awareness among the population.
For the past 5 year s there has also been substantial influx of Uzbeks, coming especially to the capital of Czech Republic. There are two major groups which can be identified in growing Uzbek community. The first group are students. They seek for qualified but not very expensive higher education. After graduation and getting their degrees from Czech and non-Czech Universities located in Czech Republic many of them tend to stay in the country. For the year of study they get a good common of Czech language and being famous for hardship working style and linguistic skill (after Soviet Era most of them know Russian, plus English which is taught as foreign language in every Uzbek school) they are starting their careers mainly in international companies operating in the country. Another big group of Uzbeks coming to Czech Republic are unskilled workers, who come to work mainly in construction industries. At the beginning they tend to come for seasonal works, but since they don’t have that much working opportunities back home, many of them also stay entering Czech “non-official” labor market.
There is also not a big community (around 2,500) of Mongolians legally residing in Czech Republic. Most of them live in Prague and Blansko. This community was noticeable when they became the target of protests by right-wing extremists. Mongolians also make up one of the larger groups of illegal migrants detained at the border with Slovakia
The Czech language remains a small cultural barrier for foreigners coming to work and live here. Many of “country guests” find it very difficult to learn. On the other hand international companies don’t usually require knowledge of Czech, stating English or German as business language. In fact, many of them also arrange Czech language courses for their foreign employees in an effort to overcome the language barrier and help employees better integrate into the Czech environment.

Author: Elvira Batdalova
e-mail: freedom.cooki@gmail.com

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