Samenvatting

The objective of this paper is to offer a better understanding of emigration of highly-skilled Slovak nationals to European Union and finding out a solution to decrease their count.
Europe is a continent forged by immigration and will continue to be so whether people like it or not. The enlargement of the European Union in 2004 provided a unique opportunity to study the impact of the lifting of migration restrictions (Article 45 TFEU and Directive 2004/38/EC & 2014/54/EU influence workers´ freedoms the most) on the migrant´s sending countries. Initial UK estimates on how many new EU citizens from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) would come looking for work were around 15.000. Not even three years after, it was confirmed by British statistics that some 683.000 Central and Eastern European citizens registered to work there. As such, the work force and brain-drain from these countries was strong and Slovakia as second largest immigrant sender began to feel the strain already from the first year of being a Member State of the European Union (Bale, 2005).
This paper reveals that the reasoning behind emigration from Slovakia, monetary dissatisfaction and high unemployment, is significant to finding a solution to manage ebbing work force of tertiary educated Slovak nationals. This is so because letting able and educated people leave easily and without any incentives to return hurts the country´s economic, social and cultural position in world politics.
Therefore, Slovakia should create possibilities and resources for highly-educated people to either stay or return to Slovakia and work on increasing its prosperity. There is no official project of Slovak Republic dealing with migration, labour migration or brain-drain within the EU. However, there are few private organisations such LEAF, or projects like FAMO that try to understand migrant behaviour and reduce brain-drain in Slovakia.

Trend in nowadays European Union is to concentrate on migration from third countries and migration within the EU tends to be forgotten. In the past, however, some countries dealt with these matters during their Presidency for the Council for the European Union (Czech Republic and currently Latvia). As it stands, the need for this research is to restore this problem on Slovak example.

Proposed recommendations for Slovak Republic and other countries in similar situation are listed at the end of this paper. This is accompanied with a list of interesting studies, projects and articles for further perusal.