THE STATE, FAMILY AND MONEY: SOURCES OF MIGRANT PRECARITY IN THE VIETNAMESE DIASPORA LIVING IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC

This article examines the precarious conditions faced by Vietnamese migrants and explores how these precarities are perpetuated throughout their migratory journey. The analytical data were collected through engaged observation in five migrant families and 78 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted in various cities of the Czech Republic from summer 2019 to spring 2023. The article argues that in Vietnam, people do not rely on the state welfare system. Instead, they create a complex network of negotiated socio-economic security based on family and kin. Due to the various agents shaping their migratory path, this mentality is transplanted by Vietnamese migrants to the Czech Republic, where they continue to rely on their traditional social family and kin networks to face the precarity they encounter. Nevertheless, maintaining this transnational network of socio-economic security is so expensive that it only reproduces the migrants' precarity, which may be passed on to the next diasporic generations.