Slovaks leave the country without saying goodbye

It isn't possible to state precisely how many Slovaks are working abroad because they often don't inform the authorities that they are leaving. This was reported by Pravda on Wednesday. Many Slovaks who have been living abroad for years still have an official address of residence in Slovakia. According to official statistics, the number of Slovaks leaving the country has been falling. A total of 955 people left officially in the first half of this year, while the figure for the first half of 2013 was 2,770. Sociologist Zuzana Kusá doesn't find the figures to be trustworthy, however. "The statistics are based on changes in addresses, so they really do underestimate emigration because most of our citizens try to maintain their addresses and don't announce any change. Those 955 people mentioned in the statistics are really an underestimated figure", she said. Kusá added that the only way to come up with more reliable figures is to use data from the destination countries. For example, she pointed to a study in which the number of Slovaks registering themselves in the Czech Republic was compared to the number of Slovaks who had announced their departure for the country in question. The number of the former was found to be as much as 40 times the number of the latter. "Even when you live somewhere else for years, you still want to come home, you want to have some advantages. That's why the figures produced by the country from which people leave are always too low", stated Kusá. Chairman of the Global Association of Slovaks Living Abroad Vladimír Skalský has called for a change in the law that would alter the way in which statistics are calculated. He would also like to see a distinction made between Slovaks who have gone abroad to find work and people of Slovak descent whose families have been living in another country for up to several generations.