Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Ukrainian labour migrants in Czechia

Publication at Faculty of Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts |
2015

Abstract

This book is a joint project by the Geographic Migration centre (Geomigrace) research team from the Department of Social Geography and Regional Development of the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, and it is based on research undertaken between 2010 and 2012. The book looks at issues of international migration, remittances and development, focusing primarily on the analysis of financial transactions made be migrants (start of remittances, links between remittances and earmings and expenditures, their "implicit and relative" size, the frequency and forms of tranfer, as well as factors affecting the extent of remittances).

Remittance issues are considered in the wider context of the globalizing world (using, for instance, the concept of migration transnationalization) as well as in the socio-economic and geographical reality of both Czechia and Ukraine. On the micro-level, the analysis of remittances in the book is tied primarily to research into life style of Ukrainian migrants (through the concept of "everydayness") and also to the concept of a "time-space" geography, with the mapping of space-time recordings of migrants' movements in Prague.

The book as such has four parts. In the first one, the issues of migration and development are considered with a special focus on remittances.

The second section includes a brief introduction to Czechia and Ukraine, particularly Carpathian Ruthenia, and the socio-economic, demographic and geographical context of migration that significantly influences the remittances considered. The third part comprises analytical contributions based on own diverse emprirical research carried out with Ukrainian migrants working in Czechia.

It was: a) a longitudinal approach using the diary method with 22 Ukrainian respondents; b) a survey carried out with 321 remitting Ukrainian migrants in Prague and its surroundings. The fourth final section is dedicated to politics and practice.