Dichotomous rhetoric and purposeful silencing: Contradictions of Czech and Polish post-2015 migration policy vis-à-vis immigration from South Asia

Abstract

Immigration became an especially thorny and publicly discussed issue with the so-called Refugee Crisis beginning in 2015. The stance of the Czech and Polish governments was dominated by strong anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric. Still, both countries have witnessed a steady increase in mainly short-term immigration from various Asian countries such as Bangladesh or Pakistan ever since. This paper analyses Czech and Polish migration policies against the backdrop of a historically constructed notion of anti-illegal immigration policy, and category of temporary migration, coupled with the problematic nature of debt-financed migration in Asia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Czechia and Poland (2018-2021), in-depth and semi-structured interviews with migration experts, academic and grey literature, official documents, and the method of Accidental ethnography, this paper argues that silencing of actual labor immigration in political communication while employing anti-migration rhetoric represents a discursive gap typical for liberal democracies. It further concludes that rendering migrant labor as a temporary commodity and turning a blind eye on recruitment of international migrants represents a continuity practice of migrant labor subordination within the nation-state, originating during colonialism and the advent of capitalism in the nineteenth century.

Introduction

The migration issue was hardly a political priority in the countries of the Visegrad Group (V4: Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) before 2015 (Drbohlav and Janurová, 2019; Krzyzanowski, 2018). ¹ The so-called migration crisis rendered migration as a whole across Europe an unwanted occurrence, leading to the stigmatization of immigrants and asylum seekers. Populist and nativist parties throughout Europe, particularly in the V4 countries, adopted a strong anti-immigration stance and portrayed asylum seekers from Muslim countries and other unauthorized migrants as an imminent threat to security (Kucharczyk and Mesežnikov, 2018). Despite no refugees heading to the Central and East European countries (CEECs), some high-ranking politicians of the V4 warned of an ‘invasion’ to Europe since then (Kucharczyk and Mesežnikov, 2018).

In Czechia, Miloš Zeman, the former Czech president (in office 2013–2023) and erstwhile leader of the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) in the 1990s, spread anti-Muslim narratives, proclaiming that ‘migrants threaten Europe by creating ghettos of a ‘culture of murderers and religious hatred’’ (Strapáčová and Hloušek, 2018: 11). In Poland, the leaked Migration Policy of Poland in 2019 (Stowarzyszenie Interwencji Prawnej, 2019), authored by the Polish Department of Analysis and Migration Policy of the Ministry of the Interior and Administration, revealed that Islam was equated with a security threat, and racialized Muslims were portrayed as potential terrorists (Pędziwiatr, 2019).

The governments of V4 countries vocally opposed Western elites represented by the EU, seen as infringing on the sovereignty of the nation-state, and endangering traditional values and the stable notion of identity of Central Europeans through the imposition of refugee relocation mechanisms (Melito, 2022). This rejection of imposed hegemony from Brussels was accompanied by a call to protect ‘our way of life,’ perceived as threatened by the disintegrating tendencies of dictated multiculturalism. Namely in Hungary and Poland, this legitimized a shift towards illiberalism by resurrecting an imagined continuity with a genuine past (Melito, 2022: 356–357). In response to the highly conservative stance of the V4’s political leadership, older EU member states, liberal politicians, and activists across the West criticized Eastern Europeans from former communist countries for their moral failure and perceived lack of civilization, in fact, mirroring to an extent how Eastern Europeans viewed migrants (Dzenowska, 2018).

The migration issue became an arena for contestation over state power among political actors through the mutually interlocked process of politicization and mediatization, significantly altering how migration was debated and perceived (Krzyżanowski et al., 2018: 7). However, the shift in mediated political discourses on migration in 2015 was not entirely new, as it was rooted in historical patterns of thinking about otherness and immigration (Krzyżanowski, 2018). Similarly, Bartoszewicz (2021) considers the entire society as an active agent that initiated the securitization demand to which populism responded and fed off. Only through the reinforcement and cultivation of societal ‘hype’ by attention-seeking politicians can securitization, xenophobia, and perhaps racism, as Bartoszewicz et al. (2022) put it, have the potential to become the ‘new normal,’ defining how irregular migrants are perceived (Bartoszewicz, 2021; Bartoszewicz et al., 2022). It is important that, in Czechia, for instance, migration remains perceived as an ontological threat and represents a prevailing political frame until today (Bartoszewicz and Eibl, 2022).

Still, it was far from the truth that the migration Europe witnessed mainly during 2015–2016 was dominated only by one homogenous group of racialized asylum-seekers antithetical to Western culture. Contrary to the anti-immigration stance, migration from South Asia to Czechia and Poland has been dynamically increasing since approximately 2014 and 2015, with the pandemic causing only a temporary halt (Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic, 2023a; Office for Foreigners PL, 2023; Pędziwiatr and Kugiel, 2024). The migrants from South Asia coming to Czechia and Poland are mostly young male short-term workers, ranging from semi-skilled to skilled, as well as international student-migrants. They represent diverse religions, ethnicities, genders, and other identities. While migrants from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan dominate, migration from the Maldives and Sri Lanka in both countries remains low but is also witnessing a relative increase. Although the magnitude of migration of citizens from Bhutan and the Maldives is negligible compared to labor-export-oriented countries in South Asia, such as Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. The increase in immigration between 2015 and 2022 in both the Czech Republic and Poland was mainly in short-term residence permits, representing in all cases more than 90% of issued permits (Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic, 2023a; Pędziwiatr and Kugiel, 2024). The largest immigrant groups in both countries were from India, followed by Nepal and Bangladesh. Overall, the issuance of short-term visas from these countries doubled in most cases between 2015 and 2022, and in the case of Bangladesh, it increased at least tenfold in both countries. ²

This study seeks to shed light on the silenced aspects of migration policy against the backdrop of overall anti-migration rhetoric, specifically focusing on anti-illegal immigration policy (Walters, 2010b) in Czechia and Poland. The analysis presented here centers on the discursive gap (Czaika and De Haas, 2013) in the studied countries, aiming to reveal why certain aspects of state migration policy remained silenced, while the manipulation of others allowed populist movements (ANO in Czechia) and far-right governments (PiS in Poland) to come into power. Despite neither Czechia nor Poland having colonies, this study suggests that rendering migrant labor as a temporary commodity and refusing to accept typically Muslim refugees is driven by the colonial legacy of migrant labor subordination within the national state (De Genova and Peutz, 2010; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) and racial differentiation (Mayblin and Turner, 2021). Following Klaus et al. (2020), this paper understands migration policy broadly as a reaction of the state to distinct migration processes, including political speech as an important device to proliferate various discourses, especially in the context of politicized and mediatized discourse on migration. Of particular interest to this paper is what can be labeled as ‘a policy by omission’ (Klaus et al., 2020) or ‘politics of decontextualization’ (Walters, 2010b), which can have serious implications for migration management and how illegality is perceived and produced.

Popular discourse versus Czech and polish migration policy documents

Czaika and De Haas (2013: 493–494) suggest that publicly stated intentions and objectives of politicians and various other stakeholders are problematic benchmarks for any evaluation of policy effectiveness, because vote-winning and effective lobbying may require narratives that do not fully reflect real intentions,’ and that the ‘tough rhetoric may give the misguided impression that immigration policies have become more restrictive.’ This implicit discrepancy between discourses and actual migration policies (laws, regulation, and measures on paper) is what Czaika and Haas call the discursive gap. They explain the discursive gaps through three factors. First, migration policies often result from compromises among competing interests of various actors. Second, especially in liberal democracies, policy options are limited by other economic, political, and legal determinants over which governments have restricted control. Third, even though in practice migration policies usually focus on certain categories of migrants, the discourses are often of a ‘broad-sweeping nature,’ promoting unequivocally specific goals such as ‘fighting illegal migration' or ‘attracting talent' (Czaika and De Haas 2013: 494), which is the scenario in both studied countries.

Contrary to the hardline discourse outlined earlier in the Introduction, the most recent migration policy documents in the Czech Republic and Poland provide a systematic approach to various aspects of migration policy. Overall, both policies primarily frame migration through the lenses of economic needs and security concerns. The main focus of both countries is on the tensions between normative categories they classify as ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ migration. Their dedication lies in eradicating ‘illegal’ migration and ensuring that ‘legal’ migration effectively serves the economic interests of the state. The latest publicly released official migration policy document The Migration Policy Strategy of the Czech Republic from 2015 consists of three major themes - perceiving migration as a threat, a dominance of short-term migration, and selectivity with an emphasis on qualified migrants (Stojanov et al., 2021). ‘Legal’ migration, understood as economic migration, is based on the principle of ‘flexibility,’ allowing the Czech Republic to intentionally adjust the volume of labor immigration according to the state’s needs and resources, while strengthening the security aspects of immigration and preventing security risks.

Recently, two major migration policy documents have been published in Poland: the ‘Diagnosis’ in 2020 and the ‘Agenda for 2021–2022’ in 2021 (See Ministry of the Interior and Administration Republic of Poland, 2020; Ministry of the Interior and Administration Republic of Poland, 2021). The latter document argues that the Polish labor migration model is based on short-term and circular migration, which should be supported alongside the overall strengthening of institutions governing migration. It also aims to enhance the potential of highly qualified and qualified workers while considering cultural and linguistic proximity. In the illegal migration section, the document wants to strengthen the state’s policing apparatus and make the return policy more effective due to the ‘growing scale of inflow of foreigners to Poland’ (see Agenda for 2021–2022: 9).

Fighting illegality through deportations as a state-making project

The notion of migration as a threat to national security and the need to control borders against ‘illegal migration’ have officially become part of migration policy, particularly since 2015. By focusing on ‘anti-illegal activity’ within contemporary migration management, Walters (2010b) explains that the EU’s common policy on illegal migration constitutes an active force shaping the social world and a state-making project. The EU’s anti-illegal immigration policy was formulated by international agencies functioning outside the framework of the EU during the 1980s and 1990s. These agencies viewed irregular migration mostly as a security issue that should be addressed by strengthening policing mechanisms and cooperation between states and various agencies (Walters, 2010b). Importantly, the main measures and objectives of this policy were also adopted by the new EU member states. According to Walters, the fight against illegal migration embodies a specific political imagination of Europe as a ‘self-contained region,’ surrounded and challenged by other similar but less well-governed polities. This imagination is tied to specific spatial and social dimensions outside the EU, from where the majority of unauthorized migration is supposed to originate. Policy instruments to prevent irregular border-crossing are mostly targeted at visa regimes, border management, partnerships with third countries, and the removal of ‘illegal’ migrants through readmission and return policies. As a matter of fact, in many countries, including historically Czechia and Poland, a significant source of illegal migration is not unauthorized border crossings but instances of visa expiration or undocumented employment (Ministry of Interior CR, 2023b; Pędziwiatr and Kugiel, 2024; Walters, 2010: 84).

This fact stands as one of the major nodes in discourses on legal and illegal migration, as otherwise law-abiding immigrants are always latent illegal migrants, and therefore subjects of potential removal. De Genova (2002) views migrants’ deportability, the state in which an individual becomes a potential subject of deportation, as a means to manifest the state’s sovereign power. De Genova and Peutz (2010: 3) argue that what they call deportation regimes are an ‘increasingly standardized instrument of statecraft’ and a ‘disciplinary practice’ used to render non-citizen populations ‘deportable.’ They contend that the punitive practice of deportation by nation-states is preceded by ‘histories of labor subordination, ideological suppression, and ethnic and racial discrimination’ (De Genova and Peutz, 2010: 6). Cvajner and Sciortino (2010: 395) are convinced that ‘irregularity is a specific relation to political power’ and, as such, cannot be applied to describe a whole part of the migration flow. As I will discuss later, irregularity or illegality as a specific juridical status (De Genova, 2002) can stem not so much from migrants’ behavior as from ‘policy by omission’ (Klaus et al., 2020).

Coloniality of borders and migrant labor subordination in the nation-state

Despite migration not being a subject of wide societal debates in V4 before 2015, the control of immigration to the territories of sovereign states and the conceptualization of migrant labor have historically been shaped by global socio-political developments predating the existence of Czechia and Poland as sovereign nation-states. Walters (2010a), for instance, traces the origins of modern deportation regimes back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when states initiated deportations to govern populations, namely those deemed socially problematic and migrant workers during economic decline. Mayblin and Turner (2021: 71, 137) further assert that ‘border policies emerged to control a racialized conception of mobility through empire, institutionalized in citizenship and visa laws.’ In their view, the existing scholarship tends to overlook the fact that the borders and security are underpinned by the colonial histories and legacies of the US and European empires.

For instance, the equation of Islam with terrorism, fits into a broader schema of Orientalism and colonial racism, which justifies rendering Islam and the West as culturally incompatible categories. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s analysis of racism as having two mutually interconnected registers - biology and culture – Mayblin and Turner (2021) assert that terrorism and violence are seen as resulting from Islamic culture, which is perceived to have a priori problematic values (see also Kapoor, 2018). Following this logic, asylum-seekers especially from Muslim countries are depicted as barbaric and antithetical to ‘Western culture’ (Mayblin and Turner, 2021: 141–144). Therefore, it is the construction of illegality as being primarily a problem of ontological security (Bartoszewicz, 2021) associated with certain group of people with geographically and culturally located identities, what to a great extent legitimizes the measures aimed at removal of people in question, for example in the name of fighting the terrorist induced violence stemming from a problematic culture.

Speaking of migration governance, as pointed out by Walters (2010a), even the origins of proliferation of modern immigration laws and the process of making new border regulations is inherently linked with capitalist expansion and the emergence of modern forms of short-term contractual migrant labor at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first law regulating migration at the borders was the Chinese Exclusion Act introduced in the United States (1882) that prevented Chinese immigration in the name of security. McKeown (2012) explains that the majority of modern immigration laws, including laws in non-colonial states, are direct descendants of regulations introduced in the US as they started spreading globally approximately since the 1930s.

Following a Marxist analysis, Mezzadra and Neilson (2013: 102–108) assert that abstraction of labor remains an essential feature of the functioning of global capitalism, of which international division or multiplication of labor is an inherent part. For that reason, the understanding of the meaning of particular position of migrant labor within the national state is crucial. The labor power of migrant workers was, in the industrial and nationalist moment of capitalism, as Mezzadra and Neilson put it, rendered and treated as imported raw material supplementing the labor already present in national labor market. Basically, it was made to meet the needs of capital within the nation-state in such a way that the reproduction of the stock of national workforce remains intact. The examples over the history are plenty spanning from the colonial indenture labor, guest workers schemes, exploitative regimes in the Middle-East and South-East Asia or other various temporary labor migration programmes.

The process of abstracting labor from their bearers is also inherently tied to the border making. McKeown (2012) considers the creation of a migrant who exists indenpendently from her or his social relations to be the major shift in how migration became regulated, as the focus has shifted to regulation at the entry to the territory from the manner in which migrants traveled. Migrants became categorized based on their wealth, family and political affiliation, education, place of birth, and began to be perceived primarily as individual entities detached from their social contexts, including community-based migration brokers and various intermediaries responsible for facilitating their movements. Similarly, Mezzadra and Neilson point to ‘the impossibility of considering the bearers of labor power as neutral subejcts who exist indenpendently of the power relationships of gender, ethnicity, and race that are inscribed onto their bodies’ (2013: 105)

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the large-scale movement of mostly short-term migrant workers within continents, who were seen primarily as ‘units of economic production,’ making it possible to achieve higher production and constituting a ‘cheap’ and ‘disposable’ labor force, both under indentured and later ‘free’ labor migration (Tinker, 1974: 39). Tinker, in his famous account of indentured labor, argued that modern labor migration schemes are structural descendants of slave trading, designed to ensure planters with ‘the minimum of restrictions’ while employing ‘the maximum of leverage against its workers,’ including various forms of financial obligations for migrants to finance their journeys (Tinker, 1974: 115; Amrith, 2013). The relegation of migrants to temporary and disposable status is an important practice of migration control today, as it used to be in plantation regimes. Gardner (2010) elucidates that in Bahrain, deportability concerns all non-citizens due to a legally sanctioned system that produces dependency on their employers. This issue is particularly pertinent in developed countries practicing temporary labor visa regimes, such as Canada or Australia, but also in countries like Poland or Czechia, where the majority of new labor immigrants are holders of temporary residence permits. For instance, Tryandafillidou (2022) shows that various types of migrants, including highly skilled individuals or international students, experience precarity associated with the temporary nature of their status (see also Nyland et al., 2009). Most recently, Weatherburn’s study (2023) on the Single Permit Directive’s implementation in Czechia, Spain, and Belgium revealed disproportionate dependency of non-EU nationals on their employers.

Popular discourse renders migration as something a priori illegal that must be fought, framing how temporary living labor is to be dealt with if it does not comply with terms defined by control mechanisms of the state. I will argue that both the notion of illegality and the temporarity of status as categories of governance are inherently tied to colonialism and associated modes of constructing material and cognitive borders (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013), which became prominently articulated also in non-colonial states in Europe through their historical and structural entanglement in global capitalism and other power hierarchies, such as the EU. As stated by Walters (2010b: 90), not taking into account the significant implications of Europe’s connections to the outer world represents a ‘politics of decontextualization’.

Methodology

This study draws primarily on ethnographic interviews (Spradley, 1979) conducted in Czechia and Poland with professionals working in migration-related fields between 2018 and 2021. It also engages with academic and grey literature, migration policy documents and available resources on the International Student Union archive in the Czech National Archive related to South Asia. This paper also utilizes the method of accidental ethnography (AccE) (Fuji, 2015; Levitan et al., 2017) designed to incorporate practitioners’ experiences into a planned study as post hoc data (Levitan et al., 2017). According to Lee Fujii (2015), AccE serves as a means to make sense of accidental encounters during the research process as complementary research data to better understand the researcher’s positionality and social context. A critical aspect of AccE involves reflecting on accidental moments and linking observations from these moments to larger research questions, themes, and other methods and data (Fujii, 2015: 537).

In this study, I leverage my volunteering experience (2017–2018) in a Czech NGO, the Online Encyclopedia of Migration, as an unplanned research opportunity and an entry point to the larger political context of post-2015 Czechia, Poland, and the EU. This experience, to some extent, guided my thesis project and, for that reason, contributed to the results of this paper. First, I entered my research field during the political upheaval in Czechia, which strongly contrasted the actual reality and personal experience—no refugees were heading to the studied countries, yet immigration was rapidly increasing, and there was a long-term presence of migrant, including Muslim, communities in both countries. Second, there was a severe lack of addressing the root causes of migration and humanitarian actors’ voices in mediatized and politicized debates on migration. Hence, this paper focuses on the discursive gap, the context in the countries of migrants’ origin, and aims to bring voices other than political into the debate on the so-called refugee crisis and ‘illegal migration.’ The interview, as a major tool of ethnographic inquiry, allows to reveal other discourses informing current policies and is therefore useful for exploring the gap in knowledge on migration in the studied countries.

The main focus of the interviews was on the discrepancy in anti-immigration rhetoric and the actual increase in labor immigration from South Asia, the challenges and obstacles faced by migrants during the migration process within the socio-political context of Czechia, Poland, and the EU, and the role of various intermediaries, such as recruiting agencies or community-based brokers, within this process. All the interviews were transcribed and analyzed following the guideliness of Grounded Theory Method (GTM). Drawing mainly on Strauss and Corbin (1999), I proceeded with open coding, followed by axial coding, from which three major categories and analytical layers emerged for use in this paper. Topics such as the politicization of migration, the temporariness of migrants’ experience, and the increasing complexity of the migration process dominated most interviews. The central category resulting from selective coding revolved around the dichotomous nature of official government communication and migration policy documents, and the omissions about reality and context producing labor immigration.

As this research was designed as a developing study (Punch, 2016) spanning over a period of 3 years, an important aspect of the research process was the constant dialogue between the literature and the gathered ethnographic material. After completing the analysis, I juxtaposed the findings with the theoretical literature. From this process emerged the analytical layers of the following section focused on: (i) the discursive gap between anti-migration rhetoric and immigration from South Asia to Czechia and Poland, pointing to the contradiction between anti-Muslim and anti-immigration narratives and the increasing presence of migrant workers from ‘culturally distant’ countries; (ii) the category of temporariness (Tryandafillidou, 2022) and the institution of debt (IOM, 2019) as tools for the control of migrants in the national state and their implications for the proliferation of illegality; (iii) the unregulated labor recruitment, or a policy by omission (Klaus et al., 2020), in the context of increasingly more commercialized and complex immigration procedures (Hernandéz-León, 2013; Xiang and Lindquist, 2014).

The interviews in Czechia were primarily conducted in person in 2019, with one conducted online in 2021, totaling 12 interviews. The interviews in Poland were mostly conducted online during the first half of 2021 due to the pandemic, totaling 15 interviews. The majority of my interlocutors were from Warsaw and Prague, the capitals of the studied countries. Interlocutors were selected and interviewed based on their expertise in the socio-political context of immigration from South Asia to Central Europe. Following the approach of Stojanov et al. (2021), I primarily interviewed experts in managerial positions or with extensive experience in migration. The backgrounds of the interlocutors included academia, business, state bureaucracy agencies, and non-governmental local and international organizations. Different expertise was equally represented, although human rights-centered expertise dominated. The interlocutors are coded as ECR1-12 for Czech interlocutors and EP1-15 for Polish interlocutors. While most interlocutors provided insights from the perspective of their national context, they also addressed the broader Central European and EU context, and the global political economy. Although only a few interlocutors had significant and often long-term experience with South Asian migrants due to the relatively small scale of immigration from this region, they connected South Asian migration to the wider issue of labor immigration from non-European countries, pointing thus to the shared experience of many migrants regardless of their nationality.

Analysis

The discursive gap between anti-migration rhetoric and immigration from South Asia to Czechia and Poland

The origins of migration from South Asia to Czechia and Poland are historically located and connected with the International Union of Students (IUS), which was established in Prague in 1946. The IUS was an international organization of students of Eastern Bloc campaigning for student rights and participating in the global anti-colonial movement (Brůhová, 2018). Soon after the emancipation of newly emerged nation-states in South Asia in the second half of the 20th century, the IUS facilitated the enrollment of South Asian students at universities in Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Eastern Germany, and other countries of USSR, as part of developmental cooperation between like-minded countries around the world. The first South Asian migrants to CEEC were therefore students who later, after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, either returned to their home countries or chose to stay. Those who stayed took up prestigious jobs or established their own businesses after completing their degrees, including some who obtained PhDs. Notably, the current migration from Bangladesh to Czechia and Poland, for instance, is to a large degree based on the knowledge and activities of these early migrants, who began attracting migrant workers to their own businesses or acting as labor brokers for Czech and Polish companies. This trend accelerated around 2014 and 2015.

Although migration from Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan has been present in CEECs since the second half of the 20th century, these communities, as pointed by EP10, a director of NGO assisting migrants, are still perceived as ‘very exotic and unknown’. The general consensus among the interviewed interlocutors is that the reality on the ground has little to do with the politicized debates surrounding migration, pointing thus to the discursive gap. For instance, EP11, a scholar in migration studies, argued that:

‘Officially, it’s very strict policy, very conservative, particularly if we just speak about people from other regions of the world, so from out of Europe. But in practical terms, it looks completely different. So in practical terms, for example, if you just consider labor migration, the story is that Poland has possibly the most liberal migration policy in Europe.’

EP1, a former diplomat, dismissively referred to the anti-Muslim rhetoric in the face of long-term presence of these communities and growing demand for labor (see later) immigration as ‘regular propaganda.’ ECR8, an expert in migration policy and communication in an international NGO, was concerned about the fact that ‘we speak about migration and not about people.’ According to her, migration as a topic is primarily a political problem perpetuated by the media and politicians who play a negative role in creating a public image of especially Muslims as a threat. ECR4, for example, forecasted with precision that:

‘If we were talking about another country, for instance Ukraine, we could probadly speak about an acceptance of refugees from there, instead of sending of humanitarian aid, because Ukranians are culturaly, religiously, ethnically and racially closer than those Syrians.’ ³

In contrast to the general perception of Muslim immigration, EP9, a translator for Polish border guard, made a comment regarding Bangladeshi immigration:

‘You may not be a fan of foreigners, but our economy needs workers. And they are rather peaceful people, they are simply trying to work for money and have a quiet life.’

In fact, in both countries, there has been a simultaneous growth in job vacancies, coinciding with the period of increased immigration, confirming the primacy of economy in determining the magnitude of labor immigration (De Haas, 2012). Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Polish Statistical Bureau reported a significant rise in demand for workers in Poland, more than doubling from 74,600 in the first quarter of 2015 to 158,700 in the first quarter of 2022. Meanwhile, the Czech Statistical Bureau reported an even more dramatic increase in job vacancies in Czechia, growing from 76,000 to 360,000 during the same period. It is noteworthy that many of these vacancies do not require specific qualifications in either country (Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, 2023; Statistics Poland, 2023a, 2023b).

The demand for foreign workers as the driving force behind increased immigration from South Asia was emphasized by almost all interlocutors. ECR2, a director of a state-run integration center, highlighted that companies ‘are hungry for migrant workers,’ while ECR11, an owner of a private labor agency, stated that ‘employers are desperate to hire anybody.’ In contrast to the prevailing anti-immigration narrative, ECR5, a representative at the Czech Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, argued that promoting skilled migration while denying the need to fill job vacancies that do not require specific skills is ‘just playing with words’.

‘We are criticized for issuing a huge quantity of labor permits that are quite ugly. It is simply the uqly migration, because it is the least qualified one… Even though we pretend that we want the educated migration, the highly qualified one, the majority of job vacancies are in the lowest category [of qualification]. That is beween 80% to 90% places for foreigners.’ She added: ‘It is de facto a hide and seek game as we are saying this migration is only temporal, they will go back. It is simply just play with words.’

EP4, a labor migration scholar, argued that immigrants are generally expected to fill low-paid jobs and take on positions that native Poles do not want. Similarly, ECR12, a scholar in the field of migrant integration, contended that migrants in Czechia take on jobs that ‘Czechs simply do not want to do anymore.’ Despite these facts, paradoxically, ECR5 explained that the reason for downplaying low-skilled immigration stems from a narrative portraying migrant workers as uneducated, without qualifications, almost illiterate individuals—therefore deemed impossible to integrate—and accused of stealing work from the domestic population while driving wages lower. EP10, a director of a migrants supporting NGO, suggested that it is difficult to meet newcomers from South Asia as they mostly work outside big cities. She believed that their invisibility results from the fact that they come for a limited time, focused solely on work. ECR8 even argued that intercultural work is hindered by the tendency of some employers to keep foreign workers ‘behind closed doors’:

‘We are observing a tendency to keep the fact about labor of foreign workers in industrial zones behind closed doors, but not only their work itself, but also their housing and their whole life.’

In the view of the majority of interlocutors, the migrant workers are thus perceived as primarily serving the economic interests of private lobby, and they saw the subordination of immigration to the interests of private companies as problematic. EP10, for instance, condemned the use of ‘migrants as tools’.

Category of temporariness and the institution of debt - tools for control of migrants in the nation-state and their implications for proliferation of illegality

This section focuses on how the temporal aspect of migrants’ stay serves as a policing mechanism of the state, elaborating on temporariness as an important category (Tryandafillidou, 2022) and its implications for social control within migrants’ transnational networks. Primarily, it is the temporary nature of migrants’ stay that creates a dependency on their employers. Like other interlocutors in Czechia and Poland, ECR4, a scholar specializing in migrant integration and security studies, sees a problem in the fact that immigration regulations do not fully consider the perspective of migrants. EP5, a security studies scholar, further highlights an obstacle, stating that ‘the access to the labor market, unfortunately, does not correspond fully with the access to the territory.’ Similarly, ECR7 argued that, in relation to the situation in the labor market, Czech Republic has a ‘dichotomous relationship with foreigners’ as the national economy is dependent on foreign labor, but the state does not provide an opportunity for settlement. EP3, a scholar in human rights law, succinctly summarized the current character of labor immigration.

‘Every state wants the economic development while paying as least as possible, right? And the Bangladeshis and Indians are ideal in this regard, especially if they do not demand to stay here….So if a Bangladeshi person came here and said, I want to live here, bring my wife and establish family, he would probably be in a completely different situation than if some intermediary company comes and say, I will bring you a Bangladeshi worker here for half a year, rub his skin down and he will go back after that.’ She concluded: ‘Until the foreigners do not demand to stay, they are not problematic.’

The right to stay for non-EU nationals in both Czechia and Poland is intricately linked to the labor contract, meaning that losing a job also results in losing the permit to stay. Similarly, when changing employers, migrants are required to undergo the entire legalization procedure once again. This situation exposes them to a wide range of vulnerabilities and fears, as they face the possibility of having to return if something goes awry. In Poland, these challenges are exacerbated by the lengthy waiting times associated with administrative procedures for obtaining new permits. This delay often translates into the loss of months of legal income, pushing many workers into the realm of illegality. EP15 aptly described the situation faced by those who have worked in the country for years, yet must continue to legalize their stay annually as ‘nerve-wracking,’ since they never know what the future holds. Several interlocutors also highlighted the issue of non-objection letters issued by employers, which can be used as a potent tool to threaten employees with deportation should they consider leaving. The problematic aspect of the temporariness experienced by migrants is further compounded by the unpredictability of market fluctuations. The supposed flexibility of migrant labor, in reality, means that losing a job, particularly during economic crises when new employment opportunities are scarce, renders migrants disposable and susceptible to deportation without any right to stay.

ECZ1, an anthropologist, was convinced that individual aspirations and mindset of migrants are crucial as migrants need to agree on terms of their employment. The migration policies of both studied countries rely on short-term migration and selecting migrants based on certain criteria, such as on laborers, as argued by interviewed interlocutors, who have not many demands. EP8, a lawyer, asserted:

‘They [Ukranians] have a lot of demands….When it comes to people from South Asia, they are taking everything what you give them, they are just like okay, fine. Twelve hours, seven days a week, okay, that’s fine. No, it’s a nightmare for them, and they know it. And they also know that they will not stay here forever. I think that is the only reason they agree to be treated like this, because they don’t want to stay forever. So they think, okay, I can manage it for two, three years.… they are coming here for three, maybe four years to get as much money as they can and then they are going back home. And this is what one employee told me. And then the other factor that makes it easier to exploit those people is because employers know that they will not stay here forever. So they are willing to agree for conditions like this.’

EP5 also commented that Asian workers are seen as ideal in this regard as they are perceived as ‘non-demanding’ and ‘flexible’ compared to Ukrainian and other European workers who have started demanding ‘too much’ from Polish employers. The cultural image of Asian workers as a docile labor force is supported by the experience with Vietnamese workers, who are considered to be quiet and hardworking individuals in both Czechia and Poland. Conversely, ECR6, a migration policy expert in an NGO, and ECR3, an intercultural worker, challenged such presumption by highlighting that some Vietnamese laborers in Czechia are controlled by their recruiters-employers.

ECR9 explained that, in Czechia, anxiety about foreigners staying without a job is a consequence of the 2009 economic crisis, which has left a lasting impression on the institutional memory of the Czech Ministry of Interior, largely responsible for migration policy. As a result of losing jobs, thousands of Vietnamese and Mongolian workers found themselves stranded in Czechia, unable to return home due to substantial debts they had incurred after paying, on average, more than $9000 for labor facilitation in their country (see also Krebs and Pechová, 2008: 19). EP11 echoed similar concerns and argued that the most pressing issue for the future of migration is connected to short-term contractual labor of non-EU nationals. He emphasized that the temporariness of these arrangements could lead to the illegality and deportability of migrants, particularly if their recruitment involves indebtedness, which is not uncommon, as reported by a few interlocutors in both countries. Drawing from her experience as a court translator, EP9 highlighted the significant challenges faced by first-generation migrants without established networks, often young individuals with lower educational backgrounds who rely on third-party facilitation for their migration.

In her words, ‘they have families, they have people, sometimes they have debts. So they have people who expect the money back, and that’s a tragedy.’

She described the potential for deportation as a tragedy for these individuals, as they have invested substantial sums of money for their migration, in one case almost 15,000 EUR, and have financial obligations to fulfill.

Unregulated labor recruitment in the burgeoning migration industry and complicated migration process

The anxieties mentioned above in the migration policies of Czechia and Poland are intricately intertwined with the largely unregulated recruitment practices and activities of various intermediaries. Especially newcomers lacking supportive social networks in the destination countries are among the most dependent on these intermediary structures. The reliance on intermediaries, resulting from the complexity and lack of regulation in recruitment, combined with migrants’ limited awareness of their rights and immigration procedures, has created vulnerabilities that expose them to exploitation, indebtedness, and the risk of becoming undocumented and facing deportation.

In Poland, both EP10 and EP11 perceive large-scale recruitment negatively, describing it as depersonalized and largely exploitative. EP11 admitted that when it comes to the socio-cultural context of recruitment in the countries of origin, ‘there is a huge ignorance on our side.’ Similarly, several NGO representatives were convinced that, since we do not have visibility into migrant communities, we lack knowledge about how the negative consequences associated with international migration, which states try to eradicate, are actually produced by unregulated recruiters. EP10 said:

‘We do not have adequate knowledge about the system of bringing people here…I think this is very underregularized or nobody’s really monitoring what happens with these agencies, what they promise [to migrants], how much they do out of that and how safe this is for the migrants, how much does it cost and lots of things that are not monitored and tracked.’

ECR11, the owner of a recruiting agency, strongly criticized and challenged the Czech immigration policy under the pretext of security. She contended that unregulated and flawed recruitment practices contribute to illegality, exemplified by unauthorized onward movements from Czechia and irregular stays in other European countries. According to her, these issues are caused by the ‘mystification’ on the part of some recruiters, as well as the lack of transparency in immigration procedures. Migrants’ limited awareness and dependency on intermediary structures often lead to ‘disappointment’ after ‘facing the reality’ in Czechia, making them think about onward migration towards countries with larger communities of immigrants. She explained how recruitment might work in one of the South Asian countries:

‘The recruiters are called agents. I would say they are something like ‘people from the street’ who do this [recruitment]. It somehow reaches people around [that they do this work]. First in their village or city through their extended family. So it works on the ‘word of mouth’ basis that that this person, based on his reputation, is able to faciliate work in the Czech Republic. He does not have any licence of course.’ She added: ‘What I work with here results from what I have no chance to see…Probably the biggest problem is, I do not want to say lied to, but they are made mystified. The second problem it the total lack of organization of this process… Imagine it in a way that the whole thing there is completely off the record.’

Similarly, EP6, a human resources specialist in a company employing predominantly Bangladeshi and other Asian nationals, highlights that the recruitment of new employees from Asia is highly networked and based on interpersonal relations. Typically, when visiting family in their countries, migrants recruit their relatives and facilitate employment for them. She thought that such a system was working without any significant obstacles but asserted limited knowledge about the internal procedures and relations between migrants. Most of the interlocutors in both countries, including law practitioners themselves, argued that the laws and regulations are so complicated that even lawyers sometimes struggle to navigate them. ECR2 was convinced that due to the dependency of migrants on intermediary structures, caused by the complexity of migration, there is an ‘emerging business with poverty,’ and EP7 argued that it’s a ‘friendly atmosphere for shady companies.’ It is not surprising that ECR10, who worked in an international organization, called the current state of labor migration ‘hardcore capitalism,’ referring to the utilitarian usage of migrant labor. According to him, the protection of migrants’ rights is ‘not a priority’.

In both countries, the likelihood of exploitation was linked to the ineffectiveness of state administration due to being understaffed and underfinanced, prevalent corruption in both the countries of origin and destination, a non-conceptual approach to migration, and a lack of interest in migrants’ experiences. Even though interlocutors in both countries called for the building of a transparent immigration system, few of them realized that any investment into strengthening migration infrastructure can be seen as an investment in migrants by citizens, thereby creating a slippery slope for governments. They critically emphasized that the most crucial aspect is access to information for migrants, as the current complexity and lack of transparency hinder their ability to navigate migration and increase their dependency, for instance, through debt. In turn, if coupled with losing a job and the inability to find a new one within the prescribed period, a similar situation might result in unauthorized stay anywhere within the EU.

Discussion

The shrinking demographic profile of European countries forecasts that Europe will become even more dependent on migrant labor from non-EU countries, such as Africa and Asia (King and Okólski, 2019). Consequently, labor immigration is no longer solely a matter for the so-called ‘old’ immigration countries of Western Europe and the ‘new’ immigration countries of Southern Europe (Okólski, 2012). At the same time, while the migration crisis is typically associated with the period between 2015 and 2016 (Stojanov et al., 2021), the public debate about migration has, to some extent, remained burdened by deliberately spread confusion and anti-immigration narratives from far-right and populist political groups (Neidhart and Butcher, 2022). These tensions, when seen against the backdrop of increasing immigration not only from South Asia, point to the discursive gap (Czaika and De Haas, 2013).

Castells (2013: 3) explains that ‘power is based on the control of communication’ and the spreading of particular types of emotions, such as fear. The privileged access of high-ranking politicians to the media, and their resulting power to initiate news stories on a national and international level through their statements, has a significant potential to influence audience perception of reality. Dewski and Gerhard (2023) argue that framing is essential for shaping public opinion, for which governments choose frames resonating with the population’s already existent attitudes. Bartoszewicz’s argument about securitization from below is thus strong and allows us to understand why the countries of CEE resorted to a radical anti-immigration stance. Nevertheless, based on data from 13 European countries, Jeannet and Dražanová (2023) suggest that exposure to the principle of equality during individuals’ formative years, that is during the period of early political socialization, is essential in forming positive attitudes towards immigration in the later stages of life.

At the same time, migration attitudes among populations tend to be more positive among younger, well-off, or more educated people, but it is not clear to what extent the hardline stance against immigration today is transmitted to young people (Dražanová et al., 2023; Jeannet and Dražanová, 2023). The explanation provided by Bartoszewicz and Eibl (2023) regarding how migrants are perceived across different age groups suggests that migrants in Czechia are seen as particularly negative figures. Paradoxically, foreign workers are not perceived as much as migrants, and their ethnicity plays only a secondary role. As suggested by Dražanová et al. (2023), evidence about the influence of macro-level institutional and sociopolitical forces in shaping public attitudes in countries beyond the USA and Western Europe is scarce. For this reason, it is difficult to estimate how public opinion would look if the topic did not become massively mediatized and politicized (Krzyżanowski et al., 2018), and was based on actual historical experience and facts, given that the topic of migration was of hardly any significance in both countries before 2015.

The anti-migration policy in Central Europe might, and probably is, largely connected to structural and material limitations. Kundnani (2023) interestingly points out that ‘there is no culture war over immigration in the normally understood sense. Rather, there is a strange and hidden class war being fought out on the terrains of race and culture.’ As Peter Turchin (2013) shows, the role of culture in the context of immigration can have a negative impact on the growth of wages at the lower end of the labor market. Immigration thus can represent competition for domestic laborers, which is a narrative vitally used in politics, as some interlocutors pointed out. Investing resources into supporting refugees might be seen as unfair by the public. Consider, for instance, the effects the mass migration from Europe had in the United States, both on those already settled (Fogel, 1989), but also the continuing disastrous effects on indigenous communities until today.

For these reasons, it is partly understandable why governments are reluctant to strengthen infrastructures other than security. On the other hand, migration is also an opportunity for creating new political subjectivities that can strengthen collective efforts to improve labor conditions and increase wages, a fact that remains largely unrecognized by political leadership (Neilson and Mezzadra, 2010; Kundnani, 2023). Also, contrary to common assumptions present in a dystopian perception of the future (Bartoszewicz, 2021), according to the influential Intergroup Contact Theory by Gordon Allport (Pettigrew, 1998), positive effects of intergroup contact can appear if four conditions are fulfilled: equal group status within the situation, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and the support of authorities, law, or custom.

Still, it seems that states continue engaging in extractive modes of capitalist production that are historically tied to what Hugh Tinker (1974) called the new ‘new system of slavery.’ Tinker strongly criticized the realities of modern contractual labor migration that developed during colonial expansion, especially to the Indian Ocean and Caribbean. Under the indenture contracts, migrants were typically tied to their employer for a period of three to 5 years, with minimal possibility to leave or change employers. Similarly, like today, various forms of financial obligations connected to facilitating migration by intermediary structures historically played an essential role in creating dependency among migrants (Amrith, 2013). It is not surprising that ECR10 called the current state of labor migration ‘hardcore capitalism’ as he referred to the utilitarian usage of migrant labor (see also Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013).

In view of many scholars (e.g. Ashiagbor, 2021; Bhambra, 2010; Křížová, 2013), not considering the interconnectedness of global processes and colonial legacies runs the risk of omitting the essential contribution of the slave trade, slavery, and other colonial relations to the development of science, the industrial boom, and the current welfare states in Europe. Although the historical involvement of the Czech Republic and Poland in transatlantic slave trade and other forms of exploitation of colonized populations is problematic, given that neither of the two countries had colonies, growing historical research points to the involvement of non-colonial regions of Europe in larger networks generated by colonialism from the eighteenth century onward. For instance, Křížová (2013) asserts that revenues from the slave trade and commodities produced by slaves in the United States were equally instrumental for the material development and industrialization of Central Europe. Later on, as put by Apor (2020), communist countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary in various ways reproduced structures of colonial exploitation, for instance, by importing labor from Vietnam or exporting weaponry, industrial products, and know-how to countries like India and Bangladesh. With this context in mind, it becomes clearer that the current immigration from South Asia to Czechia and Poland, to a certain degree, builds upon material and discursive foundations produced by colonial relations and infrastructure that were later utilized during communist regimes.

The underlying features of current migration patterns implicitly contain elements present in plantation regimes, both on a practical and discursive level. In both regards, migrants were and are simultaneously viewed as fundamental for the economy and as a danger to receiving communities. Breman and Daniel (1992: 268–269) explain that during the period of the so-called coolie trade at the advent of contractual labor migration, ‘the person collapsed into the payment.’ Migrants appear in colonial archives as mere quantified transactions in currency, inhuman agents, a cheap labor force through which it was possible to achieve higher production. Similarly, like today, the coolies’ stays in the production sites were meant to be temporary. Secondly, coolies were thought to conduct menial work and possess no skills. Thirdly, they were subject to economic fluctuations conditioned by the market and seasonal variables, and they could be dismissed as swiftly as they were hired and put to work. Namely, the first and second narratives find their reflection in contemporary discourse on labor, both in policy documents and in the understanding of interlocutors.

The discrepancy between the political discourse and practices in both countries is important to address precisely because, on the rhetorical level, the leadership of the countries in question argued against immigration to prevent scenarios of social decline and security concerns stemming from illegal migration. This paper suggests that migration policies could be more concerned with the question of illegality resulting from factors that are traditionally not considered to be part of them. These factors include migrant networks producing specific modes of recruitment and the migration governance of its own. For that reason, as some of the interlocutors suggested, understanding the countries of origin is necessary but lacking. Not taking into account the way migrants are recruited contributes to the replication of the extractive nature of colonialism by silencing this critical aspect of migrants’ experience. Also, even if it does not seem that race plays such a role from the viewpoint of the state when speaking about labor migration, it is vitally used as a rhetorical tool allowing the employment of measures against those deemed ‘illegal,’ possibly activating latent racist and anti-immigration public discourse. Despite the subordination of migrant labor not being articulated through cultural lenses, laborers under temporary visas are endangered by illegality and deportation. Once becoming illegal, they become subjects of those measures allowed thanks to the regulations aimed at fighting illegality through deportation. This is the nod where colonial discourse on labor migration management through temporariness, as an ontological category of many present-day workers from non-EU states, meets the EU’s fight against illegal migration.

As argued by Dzenowska, the strong discourses in CEECs were not radically different from those of the EU. In fact, the migration policy documents fit into the broader scheme that Western liberal democracies employ for migration (Arcarazo and Freier, 2015). This generally involves being restrictive while allowing more migrants to flow in. For example, EP10 argued that Poland has probably the most liberal policy in Europe. Although this paper suggests that this hidden openness is not an openness in the sense of heartfelt welcoming and embracing diversity brought by migrants. Quite the opposite seems to be true when the issue is seen through the lens of the discourse of migrant labor subordination and deportations as one of the major instruments of anti-illegal immigration policy (Walter, 2010b).

Similarly, in the Central European context, on the EU level, a certain group of migrants, especially those labeled as less-skilled, are subjects of economic fluctuations typically governed through seasonal work permits or other temporary forms of visas. Even though this paper does not engage with migrants’ perspective, as it focuses on the discourse among professionals working in migration-related fields, it is not clear at all how migrants are recruited and to what extent they benefit from their temporal experience, as suggested by recent research (Weatherburn, 2023).

As many interlocutors have criticized, migrants from non-EU countries in Czechia and Poland are often dependent on the will of their employers when they want to change their job and frequently finance their journeys through debts. The relationship between debt and deportation has emerged as an important aspect of migration from Asia to Czechia and Poland, but it remains unclear to what extent the transnational nature of debt enables and complicates migrants’ mobility in the studied countries. Typically, the dependency of both documented and undocumented migrants is maintained by the international character of debt used to finance their migration (Gardner, 2010). Indebtedness is a commonality across migrant-sending nations in Asia, co-created by the intermediary structures facilitating transnational movements and is vitally used as a form of coercion (Gardner, 2010; International Organization for Migration, 2019).

The nature of the functioning of an increasingly commercialized migration industry (Hernandéz-León, 2013), complicated migration infrastructure (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014), and the pivotal role of profit-oriented recruiters are largely not reflected in migration policies but were recognized by interlocutors in this study. This paper claims that the lack of attention to how migrants are produced and subsequently ‘imported’ to fill specific jobs results in both the historical development of border-making and the process of abstracting labor from actual people (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Crucially, the lack of recognition of policies of how ties and dependencies are built during the process of recruitment and subsequent employment allows for the potential exploitation of migrant workers under temporary labor migration programs, which is not uncommon (Costa and Martin, 2018). With increasing labor immigration to Czechia and Poland, as Mendoza et al. (2020) show strikingly in the case of exploited Nepali workers, it is likely that the extent of those issues will become even more salient.

The recent study on the Single Permit Directive from Spain, Belgium, and Czechia (Weatherburn, 2023) highlights that precarity and vulnerability are endemic to temporary schemes and extend across many European countries. Existing research points to visible links between international migration, labor, and modern slavery (ILO et al., 2022). However, a more nuanced understanding of how the latter, and other forms of dependency and exploitation, are possibly produced through the practices of temporariness, recruitment, and debt, and to what extent these represent continuity of colonial modes of exploitative labor migration regimes in liberal democracies is needed.

Conclusion

Tangible contradictions pertaining to the politicized and mediatized image of migration constructed by the governments in the V4 since 2015 represent a discursive gap in migration policy typical of liberal democracies (Czaika and Haas, 2013). In this regard, the Central and Eastern European states do not differ that much from their Western European counterparts. On the one hand, the draconian measures producing violence at the borders in the name of the fight against ‘illegal’ migration are promoted and rationalized through material or infrastructural limits of the receiving states or through nativist rhetoric based on the idea of cultural incompatibility, underpinned by the presumption of the superiority of one culture over another. On the other hand, the increasing temporary labor immigration from the same supposedly culturally incompatible countries has been rising during the same period.

Despite seeing those phenomena as just opposite realities, this paper argues that they are linked by a history of migrant labor subordination in the nation-states, making migrant workers ‘disposable’ and deportable via a rhetoric originating during the industrial and nationalist moment of capitalism (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013), and the advent of modern labor migration and border regimes in the 19th century. This paper evaluates the mechanism of deportation aimed at disposing of all non-EU nationals who are either falling into the category of illegals or those who are potentially illegal regardless of their legal status at the moment, as problematic. This study aims to show that the migration policies of Czechia and Poland are entangled in historically produced discourses that contribute to the production of illegality, which, as part of a political strategy, they seek to curtail.

While highlighting the perpetuation of historically constructed narratives about migrant labor and border security in migration policies in V4, this study identifies two further major features that expand the situated understanding of coloniality in migration governance in Czechia and Poland as EU’s member states. First, it is the continuity of colonial discourse on the subordination of migrant labor, particularly in the nation-state. Second, it is the ‘policy by omission’ (Klaus et al., 2020) or ‘politics of decontextualization’ (Walters, 2010b), representing another continuity of colonial practice of disembedding migrants from their social relations, rendering them abstract and temporal objects, while turning a blind eye on the recruitment and associated problem of debt. There is, paradoxically, simultaneously, a clear discursive ‘gap’ when the problem at hand is studied through a synchronic perspective, and a ‘link’ when analyzed from a diachronic perspective. The gap is only visible within the immigration policy of nation-states, while the link appears only when one explores the processes preceding the existence of international migration as a phenomenon possible to exist only between the territories defined by institutionalized borders.