Trieu Dinh Vans long journey two years ago from the rice paddies of northern Vietnam to a truck-welding factory in the Czech Republic was supposed to open up an economic lifeline. His parents,poor farmers,bet everything on him,putting up the family farm as collateral for a loan of about $14,000 to pay an agent for his plane ticket and working visa. Instead,Van,25,is jobless,homeless and heavily indebted in a faraway land,set adrift by a global economic crisis that swallowed his $11-an-hour job and those of thousands among the wave of 20,000 Vietnamese workers who came here in 2007. The Vietnamese workers are part of a larger influx of poor Asian workers,including tens of thousands from China,Mongolia and elsewhere,who were recruited to come to Eastern Europe to become low-skilled foot soldiers in then booming economies. Now,they have been hit particularly hard by the sudden contraction of those economies. In Romania,hundreds of desperate Chinese migrants camped out in freezing temperatures in Bucharest for several weeks in a protest against contractors who had stopped paying them. In the Czech Republic,soaring unemployment,which economists think could hit 8 per cent by years end,has driven many Czechs to seek the low-wage work they once left to foreign labourers. There has been a corresponding surge of resentment against minorities here,leading to fears of attacks like the one last month in which a young Roma child and her parents were severely burned when their home was firebombed in the northeastern town of Vitkov. Vietnamese workers have been a particular point of contention,even though there is a longstanding Vietnamese community here,born amid the fraternal work programmes in the 1970s. The Czechs dont like us because we look different, said Van,who lamented that he had already been accosted in Chocen,the small industrial town in eastern Bohemia where he worked,by locals shouting,Vietnamese,go home! Vietnamese labourers,he said,were also denied access to local discos and restaurants. The government has responded by trying to find ways to ship out Asian immigrants. Under a voluntary return policy started in February,any unemployed foreign worker who wants to go home is eligible for free one-way air or rail fare and about $700 in cash. In the first two months,about 2,000 Mongolians,Ukrainians and Kazakhs took up the offer. But like Van,many of the Vietnamese workers here,saddled with debt,would prefer to stay and wait for better times. 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 couldnt marry or build a house. That would be a great shame for me. Julie Lien Vrbkova,who has worked as a Vietnamese interpreter at several automobile factories in the Czech Republic,said she had been shocked by slave-like working conditions,including 12-hour days during which Vietnamese workers were beaten if they stopped working. At one factory,she recalled,a Vietnamese man had worked a week with a broken rib because he was afraid to ask for time off. The tensions are a troubling setback for the Vietnamese community here,long considered a regional success story. Many own thriving corner shops,speak Czech,and send their children to mainstream public schools,where they are routinely ranked at the top of their classes. After the overthrow of Communism in 1989,thousands more Vietnamese joined those who arrived in the 1970s. Today there are an estimated 70,000 Vietnamese in the Czech Republic,the second largest foreign community after Ukrainians.
