Trieu Dinh Van’s long journey two years ago from the rice paddies of northern Vietnam to a truck-welding factory in the Czech Republic was supposed to open up an economic lifeline. His parents, poor farmers, bet everything on him, putting up the family farm as collateral for a loan of about $14,000 to pay an agent for his plane ticket and working visa.

Instead, Van, 25, is jobless, homeless and heavily indebted in a faraway land, set adrift by a global economic crisis that swallowed his $11-an-hour job and those of thousands among the wave of 20,000 Vietnamese workers who came here in 2007.

The Vietnamese workers are part of a larger influx of poor Asian workers, including tens of thousands from China, Mongolia and elsewhere, who were recruited to come to Eastern Europe to become low-skilled foot soldiers in then booming economies. Now, they have been hit particularly hard by the sudden contraction of those economies. In Romania, hundreds of desperate Chinese migrants camped out in freezing temperatures in Bucharest for several weeks in a protest against contractors who had stopped paying them. In the Czech Republic, soaring unemployment, which economists think could hit 8 per cent by year’s end, has driven many Czechs to seek the low-wage work they once left to foreign labourers.

There has been a corresponding surge of resentment against minorities here, leading to fears of attacks like the one last month in which a young Roma child and her parents were severely burned when their home was firebombed in the northeastern town of Vitkov.

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