Abstract In this article, we apply an interpretive, cultural sociological analysis to thirty semi-structured comprehensive interviews with immigrants from Slovakia, Vietnam, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in Czechia. We identify three distinct cultural repertoires that facilitate different forms of hierarchically ordered belonging: (1) the legacy of Czechoslovakia and the privileged belonging of Slovak immigrants based on ethnonational kinship, (2) the immigrant work ethic and the ambivalent belonging of Vietnamese immigrants based on perseverance and hard work, and (3) emerging cosmopolitanism and contested belonging based on intercultural openness and the individual societal contribution of immigrants from the MENA region. The article contributes to scholarship on immigrant belonging by advancing it in three important directions. First, we foreground the cultural preconditions for different forms of belonging and their hierarchical ordering, arguing that migration research should pay closer attention to intersubjectively shared cultural repertoires and their unequal availability across national contexts. Second, we explore the cultural repertoires available to immigrants in articulating their claims of belonging in the under-explored context of states with a legacy of ethnic nationalism, demonstrating that the relative success of these cultural repertoires in facilitating immigrants’ belonging reflects their alignment with an enduring conception of Czech national identity that emphasizes shared language, ancestry, and culture. Third, we highlight the unequal availability of cultural repertoires to different immigrant groups depending on country-specific migration histories and immigrants’ ethnoracial background, intersecting with education, labor market position, and gender. Our findings underscore careful consideration of both inter- and intra-group variations in immigrants’ claims to belonging.
Klvaňová et al. (Wed,) studied this question.