ČTK |
11 November 2009
Prague, Nov 10 (CTK) - Some half million foreigners live in the 10 million Czech Republic, over ten times more than 20 years ago when the communist regime collapsed, daily Pravo writes yesterday.
Most of the foreign immigrants come from Ukraine, 131,000, the paper writes.
Only 38,000 foreigners lived in Bohemia and Moravia in 1989, mostly students from developing countries and manual workers from Cuba and Vietnam, on a training stay here, Pravo continues.
At present, a striking number of foreigners run restaurants, shops and cosmetic studios in the Czech Republic. Foreigners also work at most developer's projects.
It is the influx of foreigners that prevents the country's population from declining. About 77,000 new foreigners settle down in the Czech Republic every year, Pravo writes.
Apart from the half million foreigners with a residence permit, there are many of those who live and work in the Czech Republic illegally. Their number was estimated at three to ten thousands in the period of economic revival a couple years ago, the paper says.
At present, amid the economic crisis, the Czech state offers a free air ticket and pocket money to the foreigners who leave the country voluntarily.
In the past two decades, foreigners were flowing to the Czech Republic as cheap workforce seeking the jobs of bricklayers, auxiliary workers and workers in textile plants. Most recently, however, a layer of entrepreneurs, company owners, physicians and artists has emerged among the foreigner community, Pravo writes.
Many of them, mainly of those who came to the Czech Republic as children, have acquired university education here. They perfectly command Czech and are raising their offspring as another generation of their ethnic group but with Czech nationality, Pravo writes.
At present, about 45,000 children of foreigners study at Czech schools, including 31,000 at universities. Most foreigners among the university students are Slovaks, Pravo writes.
A crushing majority (90 percent) of foreigners in the Czech Republic are in their productive age, from 15 to 64 years.
Most of them (284,000) are employees and some 77,000 are self-employed people, mainly Vietnamese and Ukrainians.
For many years now, the countries from where most foreigners come to the Czech Republic are Ukraine (32 percent of the overall number of foreigners), Vietnam (some 60,000 people), Poland, Russia, Germany, Bulgaria, and citizens of former Yugoslavia.
Slovaks make up a specific group among foreigners in the Czech Republic, Pravo writes.
Most foreigners live and work or run businesses in Prague, Central Bohemia, in the Moravia-Silesia region, South Moravia and north Bohemia's Usti region, the daily continues.
A number of foreigners marry Czechs. About 5,000 mixed marriages are concluded annually. The divorce rate among the mixed couple corresponds to the general divorce rate in the Czech Republic. The mixed couples most often disintegrate over cultural differences, insistence on national traditions and differing view on the role of woman and on ways to raise children, Pravo writes.
A specific phenomenon are fictitious marriages that mainly foreigners from Asia and Africa seek as a step to enable their permanent stay and work in the Czech Republic.
In this category of marriages, Czech men most often marry Ukrainians and Czech women most often marry Slovaks and Germans, Pravo writes.
About 1,700 children are annually born to local foreigners, mainly the Vietnamese.
The share of foreigners in the country's overall population stands close to 3 percent now. This is a low number compared with the situation abroad, Pravo writes, adding that in Luxembourg the share of foreigners is 40 percent, in both Austria and Germany about 10 percent and in France 6 percent.
The more economically advanced country, the stronger is foreigners' interest in living there, but the bigger are the social and ethnic problems arising from immigration, Pravo writes.
archived 17 Feb 2013 02:17:57 UTC
