ABSTRACT
Until the last decade of the twentieth century, the Czech Republic was a country of emigration. Nearly three million Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. And during socialism, the country lost approximately 500,000 citizens, even though emigration was illegal. The two main waves of emigration, in 1948 and 1968, were politically and economically motivated as people fled the country’s totalitarian regime. Approximately 220,000 Czechs and Slovaks returned to Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. During the late 1940s and 1950s, about 7,000 Bulgarians and 12,000 Greeks settled in the depopulated frontier areas. 1 During the socialist/communist era, immigration mainly took place within the framework of intergovernmental agreements. Indeed, foreign labourers from other socialist countries (Angola, Cuba, Korea, Mongolia and Vietnam) were sent to Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s.
