Realizing Vienna awaits...

Caravans of buses carry commuters daily in and out of Vienna -- the city is just an hour's drive from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, and closer as the crow flies to Ukraine than to Austria's western border with Switzerland.

The coming wave will change the face of Vienna's immigrant population, currently dominated by Turks -- many of whom came for work in the 1960s -- and people from the former Yugoslavia, both seeking work and fleeing the 1990s civil wars.

However, while the Turkish community is visible in parts of Vienna like the Ottakring district where Turkish fruit stalls dominate the market, eastern Europeans tend more to blend in -- much as they did in the past.

The new forecast puts Vienna among the 10 fastest-growing European regions, in a league with flourishing areas in Ireland and parts of the Netherlands and Spain, ahead of the shrinking countries from which many of the new Viennese originate.

The expected shift in immigration comes after Austrian companies, especially banks, acquired a series of firms in eastern Europe and have transformed Vienna into a regional commercial hub over the past 15 years.

Austria shielded itself against a glut of cheap labor with transient quotas for workers and bans on self-employed craftsmen when eight eastern European countries joined the EU in 2004, followed by Romania and Bulgaria this year.

But those restrictions are due to expire by 2011, and have not stopped Austrians from stealthily hiring Czech nurses for their elderly relatives, Slovak cleaners and Polish builders.

"Future immigration will to a large extent come from EU member countries, and therefore be hard to contain, even if you wanted to," says Thomas Madreiter, head of urban planning at the city of Vienna, which commissioned the as-yet unpublished study.