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Immigration became an especially thorny and publicly discussed issue with the so-called Refugee Crisis beginning in 2015. The stance of the Czech and Polish governments was dominated by strong anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric. Still, both countries have witnessed a steady increase in mainly short-term immigration from various Asian countries such as Bangladesh or Pakistan ever since. This paper analyses Czech and Polish migration policies against the backdrop of a historically constructed notion of anti-illegal immigration policy, and category of temporary migration, coupled with the problematic nature of debt-financed migration in Asia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Czechia and Poland (2018-2021), in-depth and semi-structured interviews with migration experts, academic and grey literature, official documents, and the method of Accidental ethnography, this paper argues that silencing of actual labor immigration in political communication while employing anti-migration rhetoric represents a discursive gap typical for liberal democracies. It further concludes that rendering migrant labor as a temporary commodity and turning a blind eye on recruitment of international migrants represents a continuity practice of migrant labor subordination within the nation-state, originating during colonialism and the advent of capitalism in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to analyse the attitudes towards immigration among Czech youth and their changes on two distinct surveys of young Czechs (aged 14-19) held in 2011 and 2016, the years before and after a period of a greatly increased inflow of migrants to the European Union. In these surveys, special focus was given to changes in attitudes and factors influencing attitudes in each year. The results show that there was not a big difference in attitudes between both samples. Nevertheless, looking closely at the results, we found two main differences. The first was higher polarisation of answers in survey from 2016 than from the one held in 2011. The second one was in factors influencing answers, mainly in the statement on having an immigrant among close friends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The delimitation of nodal regions belongs among the fundamental methods of studying spatial organisation. Nodal regions are defined as regions in which intraregional interactions are closed. With respect to the available information on spatial interactions, nodal regions are defined especially on the basis of data on commuting to work, migration flows, etc. Much less attention, however, has been paid to the theoretical and methodological questions of delimitation of nodal regions based on transport flows. In this case, transport flows that rank among the bearers of basic spatial interactions have high explanatory power, as they reflect not only commuting relations (commuting to work), but also service, business, recreational and other relations. The goal of this paper is to delimit nodal regions based on car transport flows in two regions in the Czech Republic and to evaluate their relevance in studying complex socio-economic relations within the regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of structural channels in pushing Ukrainian migration along occupational lines to the Czech Republic. We argue that the integration of the Czech and Ukrainian construction sectors has generated international 'channels' that enhance the process of labour migration from Ukraine to the Czech Republic. Using a unique dataset constructed from primary data collected in Ukraine, we run multivariate models and test whether prior work experience in the Ukrainian construction sector increases the likelihood of obtaining a job in the Czech construction sector, net of other theoretically important controls. The results provide strong empirical support for the 'channelling' hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]