The initial phase of the research project started on July 1st, 2006. This phase of the project was mainly dedicated to studies of important documents and statistics in the field of international migration. We also put great efforts into the organisational activities in order to get started. We established a system of control mechanisms to achieve maximum transparency of the budget. Additionally, we started to monitor existing literature and to build up a thematic library located in the research centre in Brno. The library nowadays includes monographs, documents, essays, articles, internet sources and legislation related to migration, integration of immigrants on the labour market and their social integration. We also started to create our webpage.

There were two meetings of researchers from both of the participating institutions during the autumn 2006. During these meetings we agreed upon the research design, short-term as well as long-term objectives of the project and specific research activities for each individual member of the research team. Compared to the original proposal, we decided to add two series of qualitative interviews to the survey of employers, which was planned for 2007. The first round of interviews with employers aimed to serve as a pilot study for the survey, while the purpose of the second one was to deepen our understanding and knowledge resulting from the survey. We prepared an interview guide for the pilot study and contacted 20 employers from all major areas of economic activities. The interview guide involved a broad range of issues related to employers’ attitudes to the employment of foreigners, e.g. their motivation to hire foreign workers, the hiring process, the means of search for foreign employees, the main characteristics of jobs filled by foreigners, the quality of those jobs and the role of employers in the process of social integration of their foreign employees. These are also the topics planned to be covered by the survey. The pilot study aimed to serve as a tool for the design of questionnaires as well as the source for a separate qualitative study.

During 2006 we also approached agencies specialized in data collection. Based on their feedback, we created a database of those agencies that had shown interest in our commission coming up in 2007.

In 2006 we participated in two international conferences. The first, “Illegal labour activities of migrants in the Czech Republic and in the Central Europe”, was organised by Charles University in Prague, and the second, “Social Reproduction and Integration: ideals and limits”, took place at Masaryk University.