The Construction of the Immigration Problem in the Czech Republic: Public Action under European Influence?

The geopolitical history of the Czech Republic, which is characterized by its communist past, the construction of an independent state at the beginning of the 1990s, and accession to the EU in 2004 and the Schengen zone in 2007 is a privileged field for observing how the issue of illegal migration and its control was constructed ? or even invented ? in new EU Member States over the past twenty years. Beyond analyses of Europeanization as a top-down transfer of European models imposed to national actors, this paper seeks to explore the influence of the socio-professional careers and roles of the main actors involved locally and nationally in the definition of an immigration “problem” in the process of re-appropriation of European norms. This interdisciplinary and multilevel approach, which is inspired by the sociology of public action and the tradition of ethnographic observation, should enable us to shed new light on what anchors the legitimacy of the European project in matters of migration policy in the Czech Republic as well as in other states that recently joined the EU and the Schengen zone.