While the migrant crisis no longer fills prime-time television and website and newspaper headlines, it is still a topic that arouses strong emotions among Czechs. Why does this occur in a country with a low percentage of permanent residents from abroad? Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, a US researcher at the Department of Sociology, asks this question of her Czech friends – and now also in her new research project.
“I have been living in Brno for over nine years now, so I feel part of Czech society. On the other hand, there are still many things that I don’t really understand here,” says Jaworsky during our interview in a café near the MU Faculty of Social Studies, explaining that this was partly her motivation for submitting her grant application to the Czech Science Foundation.
As her project has now been given the green light, she and her colleagues Radka Klvaňová, Ivana Rapoš Božič and Alica Rétiová will devote the next three years to an in-depth examination of the attitude of the Czech public to migration. “We will naturally build on the work of our colleagues. For example, one explanation is that the less contact people have with other cultures, the stronger their reactions become. Another Czech researcher studied the religious aspect of this issue: paradoxically, Czechs often use their Christian background as an explanation for their hostile attitude, primarily towards Muslim migrants, even though many of them are not religious at all. In fact, it tends to be hostility to religion in general,” adds Jaworsky.
She has plentiful experience with the topic, as she studied this in both her bachelor’s and master’s thesis and during her PhD studies at Yale. One of her papers examines the different attitude to migrants in Canada and the US, which is striking since both countries are built on migration. “Americans have a mixed attitude to migrants. On the one hand, they proudly say that they are a country of immigrants, who are viewed as hard-working people who have much to add to the US culture,” says Jaworsky. However, there are also an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the US, and this is something that Americans see as a problem and is also the reason why border security is a much-discussed topic.
In neighbouring Canada, both the political rhetoric and the general attitude of the public is much more open. As Jaworsky says, there are several possible explanations: “They say that Canadians put much more effort into making multiculturalism part of their legislation; it is entrenched in their law. In the States, multiculturalism is very much a part of everyday life, but not so much of the legislation. Moreover, there was no September 11 in Canada.” However, Jaworsky now focuses her research fully on the Czech Republic.
Her study is not designed to focus solely on the recent migrant crisis but rather on the general view of migration among Czechs from different backgrounds, such as towns and villages or industrial and agricultural regions. Jaworsky and her team plan to conduct scores of personal in-depth interviews and organise discussions in pubs and local community centres so that their research represents all spheres of society. The lack of diversity is often a major problem in similar studies, where some parts of society have been completely excluded.
The media coverage of migration is another important research sub-topic of the study as the media largely shapes the context in which people view migration – both in a positive and in a negative way. The current study of sociologists from the MU Faculty of Social Studies is designed to include questions about which media people follow and what they take away from the news. “We have also planned a two-week period, where we will wait for a migration-related piece of news covered by the media so that we can study the impact in real-time on real people. We are certainly not wishing for another crisis but we could focus on reports on refugee camps that tourists encounter in Greece or a similar story,” says Jaworsky.
Growing up in an immigrant community
The movement of people is a major topic for Jaworsky and as is often the case, it is something she has personal experience of. Jaworsky’s family roots are in the region of Zakarpatska Oblast; her parents were forced labourers during WWII who afterwards emigrated to the US. They settled in Willimantic, Connecticut in 1951, and while Nadya was born in the US, she grew up in a small industrial town in an immigrant community of Catholic Ukrainians.
“The community comprised about 200 families and had its own church and club. I was fascinated by our history, culture, language and religion, and at school I would go around my classmates, asking them where they were from and saying I was from Ukraine. I could not understand that they didn’t know their roots,” remembers Jaworsky.
The industrial town where she grew up had a strong immigrant worker population, so the locals were used to immigrants and mostly viewed them in a positive light although the children would sometimes snigger at the strange clothes of the newcomers or call them “dirty immigrants”.
Back to the Central European roots
The now-associate professor took a long detour before arriving at her current career. Years ago, she studied costume design before starting a business with her husband. When her marriage failed, the 40-year-old Jaworsky decided to go back to university, originally to study economics but, in her own words, she quickly realised this was not the right choice. She found her calling in sociology, especially in courses that focused on social inequality and she arrived in the Czech Republic at the Faculty of Social Studies in 2010, a year before she finished her PhD at Yale.
“My PhD supervisor asked me whether I had already thought about where I would work and I answered, honestly, that I had not. He suggested Brno, where he had some contacts, and I thought why not since my parents were originally from this region,” says Jaworsky when describing her journey to Brno. She now attends Czech classes twice a week and feels that her quality of life has improved compared to the US. When comparing the two countries, she says that university students are the same everywhere and that she appreciates the local mix of Czech and international students and the academic freedom.