Crisis Strands Vietnamese Workers in a Czech Limbo

PRAGUE — For Trieu Dinh Van, 25, the long journey two years ago from the rice paddies of northern Vietnam to a truck-welding factory in eastern Bohemia was supposed to provide an economic lifeline. Instead Mr. Van, the son of poor, peasant farmers, is jobless, homeless and heavily indebted in a faraway land.

Mr. Van said his elderly parents put up the family farm as collateral for a loan of €10,000, or about $14,000, to pay an agent for his plane ticket and a working visa. But less than a year after he arrived in the Czech Republic, the global financial crisis claimed his €8-an-hour job at Kogel, a German truck manufacturer, and he can no longer send money home. Now he fears he will have to ask his family for a handout to survive.

“It would not be good for me to go back to Vietnam,” he said on a recent day, wondering where he would spend the night. “I would return home with empty hands and couldn’t marry or build a house. That would be a great shame for me.”

Mr. Van is one of 20,000 Vietnamese workers who arrived here in 2007, part of an influx of poor from Vietnam, China, Mongolia and elsewhere who were recruited in Eastern Europe to become low-skilled foot-soldiers for then-booming economies. But when economies across the region began to contract earlier this year, thousands became jobless and dispossessed.

In Romania, hundreds of Chinese migrants camped out in freezing temperatures in Bucharest for several weeks to protest against contractors who had stopped paying them.

Czech officials say they fear social unrest as exports plummet and unemployment, which economists say could hit 8 percent by the end of the year, pushes ever more Czechs to seek the low-wage work they once left to foreign laborers.

Although several thousand Vietnamese who came to Communist Czechoslovakia under fraternal work programs in the 1970s have successfully carved out a niche here, friction remains. The Czech government hopes that jobless migrants will go home because it fears that unemployed migrants could aggravate an already simmering backlash against minorities.

Last month, a Roma child and her parents were severely burned after suspected rightist radicals firebombed their home in the northeast town of Vitkov. Some in the Vietnamese community fear they, too, may be targeted.

“The Czechs don’t like us, because we look different,” said Mr. Van, who added that he had already been accosted in Chocen, the small town in eastern Bohemia where he worked, by local residents shouting, “Vietnamese, go home!” Vietnamese laborers, he said, were also denied access to discos and restaurants.

Under a policy begun in February, any unemployed foreign worker who wants to go home is eligible for a free one-way air or rail fare and €500 in cash. In the first two months, about 2,000 Mongolians, Ukrainians and Kazakhstanis took up the offer. But many Vietnamese like Mr. Van, who are saddled with debts, prefer to stay and wait for better times.

Ivan Langer, who as interior minister devised the return policy, said he worried that an estimated 12,000 jobless foreign workers were vulnerable to being drawn into organized crime, or being exploited as slave labor.

According to the National Anti-Drug Center, the police last year uncovered 79 large-scale marijuana grow-shops, 70 of which were run by Vietnamese. A Vietnamese man from the southeast city of Brno, suspected of heroin dealing, was beaten to death by the police in January.

Julie Lien Vrbkova, a Vietnamese expert who has worked as a translator at several automobile factories employing Vietnamese workers, said she had been shocked by “slave-like” working conditions, including 12-hour days during which workers were beaten if they stopped working.

Despite recent tensions, the Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic is one of Central Europe’s most abiding minority success stories. Many own thriving corner shops, speak Czech and send their children to Czech schools, where they are routinely at the top of their classes.

After the overthrow of communism in 1989, thousands more Vietnamese joined those who had arrived in the 1970s. Today, there are an estimated 70,000 Vietnamese in the Czech Republic, the second-largest foreign community after Ukrainians.

Vietnamese leaders here say they fear that the new class of dispossessed workers threatens to disturb a coexistence they have built over decades. In an April survey by Stem, a Prague-based polling firm, 66 percent of Czechs said they would not like to have a Vietnamese person as a neighbor.

Linh Nguyen, 22, a second-generation Vietnamese Czech, who is campaigning for the government to improve its integration policies, said the hard-working Vietnamese preferred to quietly prosper while the Czechs were content to pretend the Vietnamese were not there. He lamented that four decades after the first Asian migrants arrived in the Czech Republic, there were no Asian faces on television, in Czech popular culture or in Parliament.

Mr. Langer, the former interior minister, argued that the Czech Republic, closed off to immigration during the cold war, was ill-equipped to deal with newcomers. “Unlike in France or Germany, people here are still not used to seeing Asian or African faces in schools.”

To try to improve integration, the Czech government recently introduced new rules forcing immigrants who want to acquire a business license to have 120 hours of introductory Czech; but the lessons cost about €200 — which few indebted migrants can afford.

Jiri Kocourek, a sociologist specializing in Vietnam, argued that cultural misunderstandings had been made worse because of Czech ignorance. For example, official Czech grammar does not allow for the tones of the Vietnamese alphabet to be used on official documents such as drivers’ licenses. That, he said, had caused Czech authorities enormous confusion in distinguishing individuals in a community where thousands share the family name Nguyen.

The challenges of assimilation are evident at Sapa, a sprawling Vietnamese market on the outskirts of Prague, where newly arrived migrants can find everything from Vietnamese hairdressers to Vietnamese insurance companies, as well as a thriving business of Czech-speaking Vietnamese “middlemen,” who for fees ranging from €20 to €5,000 can arrange for visas, take fellow Vietnamese to the doctor and attend parent-teacher meetings as surrogates.

Trang Thu Tran, 21, a Vietnamese blogger who came to the Czech Republic when she was 13 — and now calls herself Tereza, after a Czech soap opera star — said the construction of a separate and parallel world meant that many Vietnamese, including those here for decades, couldn’t speak Czech, and were forced to phone a middleman to translate, even when pulled over in their cars by the Czech police.

Tran Qang Hung, the managing director of Sapa, said many migrants were coming to the market in a vain search for work. He said he had proposed to the Czech government that it build a school for the migrants, where they could study Czech and become more employable. But he said he had been turned down.

“Now that the economy is bad, the Czechs don’t want these people here,” he said. “They only want them to go home.”