More than 300,000 foreigners live in Czech Republic -- CSU
Prague- A total of 310,000 foreigners have lived in the Czech Republic by the end of September, including foreigners who have applied for asylum in the country, Bohdana Hola from the Czech Statistical Office (CSU) told journalists.

The number of foreigners in the country has grown by almost 30,000 in the first nine months of this year. Foreigners thus make up about 2.5 percent of the country's population, Hola said.

This is pretty amazing by recent historical standards although negligible by World standards. Neighboring Austria and Germany have much higher populations of "foreigners". The homogeneity of Czech population is hard to imagine for someone used to diverse environments - and it brings both benefits and challenges.

Ukrainians is the largest group of foreigners in the Czech Republic - 98,438 of them have legally lived in the country by the end of September. Almost 98,000 foreigners have come from European Union countries. Slovaks are the third largest group of foreigners - about 56,000, followed by Vietnamese - more than 39,000.

Of course, the Slovaks hardly count in terms of impact on cultural diversity. Hopefully, immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria will mix things up a bit. I'm just writing an article about the pre-WWII period and the impact Russian emigrants has on the Czech linguistic community - the result was the Prague Linguistic Circle - one of the most influential schools of linguistic thought in the last century.