Abstract
The chapter deals with the creation of the Roma minority in the Czech Lands after 1945 because a substantial part of the Roma currently living on the territory of the Czech Republic emigrated precisely in 1945-1989 from Slovakia. Author described Roma migration as chain migration with multiple migration movements both around the target territory of the Czech lands and back to Slovakia.
Based on the archival records and literature, he documents that the migrations in that period tended particularly at their beginnings at least partially to be seasonal migrations and the effort of Czech offices for the greatest control of migrating persons and limiting their movement later showed to have been imprudent. Zdeněk Uherek demonstrated that migration movements of cheap labour force from Slovakia to Bohemia and Moravia is similar in many ways to migration from south to north in France, Italy and other countries, or to movements of guest labourers to Germany, which also had similar outcomes: gradual stitching together of the families of poor manual labourers into large industrial towns, where accommodation capacity and other institutions, which are necessary for the respectable existence of families, were not prepared for them.
He labels as a specific feature typical for Czechoslovakia in 1945-1989 that, unlike the poor migrants from the south in Western countries, Roma manual labourers could not resolve their poor status by going overseas and that the closed borders put them in an unresolvable situation in large concentrations in Czech industrial towns.