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Facing migrant issues

By Benjamin Thomas Cunningham
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 12th, 2008 issue

Anyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock for the past few months has heard about the two American brothers who were deported back to the United States after they overstayed their 90-day tourist visas.

Joseph Carrano, 32, and Jon Moore, 31, said they went to the police to find out how they could stay in the country, after they sought out their birth parents and found them in Prostějov. Instead helping, they said the police detained them and held them until they could be deported.
Carrano told The Prague Post he thought the two had problems because of racial prejudice in the Czech Republic. He said he thought he and his brother were taken to a detention center because “our parents are Gypsies.”
Another story recently in the headlines is one you may not have heard — two alleged Ukrainian mafia figures were recently detained in České Budějovice for trafficking people from Ukraine.
According to the Interior Ministry, the men (Ukrainian citizens with long-term Czech residence permits) are suspected of bringing Ukrainians to the Czech Republic to work under poor conditions for companies in south Bohemia.
Workers allegedly paid $500 (8,230 Kč) each to get jobs in the Czech Republic. If the workers later complained, the perpetrators allegedly made threats about their families.
While the two stories might not seem to have a lot in common at first glance, they’re two sides of the same coin: the immigration controversy and how race plays a role in the debate.
Adding fuel to the fire, the British Council and the nonprofit group People in Need just released a “migration index” at a one-day conference titled Migration Integration in the Czech Republic and Europe. Participants discussed whether migrants to the Czech Republic are able to integrate into society.
On Saturday, March 15, you can have your say on this hot topic at the conference Immigration and the EU: Focus on Middle Eastern and North African Migration, being put on by the Center for Middle East Studies at the Metropolitan University in Žižkov (9:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m., Prokopova 16, Prague 3).
Conference organizer Lamis Khalilová said she chose the topic because it’s one she thinks about a lot as someone with Palestinian-Czech heritage. In addition, she believes everyone should get a chance to debate an issue usually handled by politicians.
“It’s not right for the politicians to make the decisions, which can often be populist and be made for completely different reasons than the public [good],” Khalilová said.
Expected speakers include Alexandre Fedorovski, who will talk about social behavior and intercultural conflicts, and Jiří Pehe, director of New York University in Prague, who will moderate a panel.
Javaid Rehman, an expert in the field of immigrant workers, is coming from Brunel Law School in West London. Migrant workers are a particularly hot topic in the Czech government right now, with politicians and companies scrambling to find enough workers to feed the economy.
Rehman says he has been working hard on getting countries to accept an international convention on migrant rights, which was created by the United Nations in 1990 but so far has only been approved by fewer than 10 countries. (The Czech Republic has not signed the document.)
“It’s a human rights treaty, with states aiming to give migrant workers a lot of rights. It’s very difficult for countries to accept,” Rehman said. “It hasn’t been as welcomed as one would expect.”
For more information on the conference, or to attend, e-mail Khalilová at khalilova@mup.cz or call 606 642 225.
Come join the debate.

Benjamin Thomas Cunningham can be reached at bcunningham@praguepost.com


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