Abstract
This paper focuses on educational migration from Russia and Kazakhstan to the Czech Republic. Education is the most often reason for applying for the long term visa and residence permits in the Czech Republic.
Russian and Kazakhstan citizens are among top applicants for it. Moreover studying abroad is nowadays trend and student migration has increased over recent decades and has become one of the major forms of contemporary international mobility.
However there is still a particular lack of attention to students in migration research and the literature on student mobility seems negligible due to the fact, that studying abroad is considered as a short-term experience. I argue that young people migrating for educational purposes often have long-term migration strategies and families of the students have strong influence on the decision-making process and on student's further intentions/plans in the Czech Republic.
This paper explores the migration process for educational purposes from macro-, micro- and meso-perspectives. The field research for this article was conducted in few cities in Russia and in the Czech Republic.
It involved in-depth interviews with 40 informants (10 male and 30 female), including young migrants, their parents, teachers at universities and language schools. Also the relevant literature to educational migration has been reviewed.