Yesterday Portfolio.hu summarized the findings of “International Migration Outlook 2018,” a yearly publication of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It turned out that the number of Hungarians who since 2006 have tried their luck in the richer countries of the European Union is much higher than earlier estimated–close to a million. Determining how many subsequently returned home is close to impossible, but according to numbers provided by host countries of immigrants from Hungary, about 600,000 Hungarian citizens might currently be working abroad.
If the Orbán government is worried about this large exodus, it isn’t calling much attention to the problem. A few years ago the government made a half-hearted attempt to lure young people back from Great Britain, but it soon became obvious that this effort was a waste of money.
The last time such a massive exodus took place from the country was in 1956, when 230,000 mostly young people left. That mass emigration, which was nothing like the current one in size, had a negative economic and intellectual impact on the country. This time around the emigration of skilled labor seriously impacts the whole economy. The government does talk about the country’s labor shortage, but it hides the real reason for it. To a casual observer it might seem that the booming economy is solely responsible for the tight job market.
László Parragh, president of the Hungarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and an influential adviser of Viktor Orbán, admitted the other day that there are not enough “white Christian” workers who could be enticed to settle in Hungary. Parragh must have realized that this reference to white Christians had a bad ring to it, so he added that he is just being straightforward on the subject. And indeed, it is no secret that the Orbán government has no intention of recruiting workers from the Middle East because they are not Christians or from Africa, even if they are Christians, because they are black. Parragh’s latest brainstorm is to create a well-trained, skilled workforce from the mostly unemployed, minimally educated Roma. A rather far-fetched proposition.
OECD reports 250,000 Hungarians in Great Britain, about 200,000 in Germany, almost 80,000 in Austria, followed by the Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and France. Every time a Fidesz politician is confronted with the sensitive topic of emigration, the answer is always that the rate of emigration from the other countries in the region is much greater than Hungary’s, which is true. The situation is especially dire in Romania, where between 2006 and 2015 on average 336,000 people left each year. Keep in mind that ethnic Hungarians are also counted by the host countries as Romanian citizens. The Polish situation isn’t much better. There each year about 282,000 people leave, mostly for the United Kingdom and Germany. The Ukrainians—128,000 annually—mostly go to Poland to replace those Poles who emigrated earlier.
Another study, done by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Wittgenstein Demographic Center, found that while the population of the 15 older member states grew by 12% between 1990 and 2017, in the 13 new member states it decreased by 7%.
I should add that a growing number of Hungarian scientists and researchers have found desirable research opportunities abroad in the last decades. Hungary has an large pool of well-qualified young or middle-aged people who find only limited opportunities at home. The exodus of these people became so serious in the first decade of this century that the Academy launched a program called “Lendület” (Momentum, Impetus). A sizable amount of money was set aside to fund research projects of “exceptionally talented” young people in all fields. Apparently since the launch of the program, some of the winners did return to Hungary because their remuneration and research opportunities at home, thanks to this program, matched or surpassed what they were enjoying abroad.
Since 2009, 164 such grants were awarded. But the recipients now fear that the program will be axed. These young scientists signed a letter asking the authorities to spare the “Lendület” program. László Lovász, president of the Academy, gave a long interview to Index yesterday in which he expressed his worry that as a result of the political interference by the government in the scientific and intellectual sphere, the exodus of researchers will begin again and fewer Hungarian scientists working abroad will contemplate returning.
I agree with Lovász that this move against the Academy’s research network will have a negative impact on Hungarian research activities. It is possible that the best-qualified people will respond to invitations by foreign universities and research centers. As for Lovász, who is a dual Hungarian-U.S. citizen and who taught computer science at Yale University between 1993 and 2000 and was a senior researcher at the Microsoft Research Center between 1999 and 2006, he is thinking about tendering his resignation as president of the Academy.
Most of the emigrating Hungarians leave the country for purely financial reasons. But many also complain about the lack of opportunities and the absence of a level playing field. Today I was fascinated by a young man who called into György Bolgár’s show. He is on the verge of moving his family abroad. He presented a long laundry list of complaints and expressed his strong conviction that there is no hope for political and economic change in Hungary in the near future. He will have no problem getting a desirable job; in fact, I have the feeling that he already has one. He attended one of the best, most competitive high schools in Budapest and during his college years spent a year at a French university. He simply doesn’t want his two young girls to live and study in Hungary. There are more and more such disillusioned people who have lost all hope and see only one solution: to leave.
While this is purely in the realm of hypotheticals I wonder if history could produce a situation when Hungarian workers would be forcibly returned to Hungary. The British have floated the idea to kick out non-British workers from the UK before and during the early days of Brexit, if I’m not mistaken. With his shamelessly anti-EU policies Orban might find himself kicked out of EU and having to deal with hundreds of thousands of deported Hungarians. Although with the current organizational/legal construction of the Union such scenario would be highly unlikely, but unlikely events have happened and, actually, are happening on the world stage if one just thinks America’s breaking ranks with the EU bordering utmost animosity between the formerly allied powers. The EU might be forced to take drastic measures and the likelihood of events such as the forced return of 500,000+ Hungarians is very low but not zero. Curious if the Fidesz government has ever considered such a scenario…
Is someone who moves from Atlanta to Los Angeles legally considered a migrant? Of course not because Georgia and California are in a political union called the United States. The same goes for a person who relocates from Edinburgh to Cardiff, as both Scotland and Wales are parts of the union called the United Kingdom.
Not denying the tremendous impact of the unprecedented exodus from Hungary, just pointing out that the terminology we use is inadequate to describe the population movements of the 21st century, particularly since the European Union acquired full legal personality under the Lisbon Treaty.
Hungarians in Britain, mostly London whose 9 million population is a woeful underestimate, have nothing to fear. The UK has a Remainer parliament, with a Remainer civil service, led by a Remainer Prime Minister, who’ve dialled back on every Brexit demand during the negotiations with the EU. And they’re on course to swallow Freedom of Movement to, like everything else flagrantly ignoring the wishes of the majority of the largest exercise of democracy in the country’s history, and the manifesto commitments given by both the governing party and opposition.
• MIGRANT • EMIGRANT • IMMIGRANT •
Show some sense, man. Presumably you are a native-born speaker of English. Why is it that you dont know that someone who moves from one distinct location to another is considered a migrant ???
The Okies who ended up in California in the 1930s during the Great Midwest Drought were migrants in every standard sense of the term, even though they did not cross any international boundaries.
Emigrants and immigrants are migrants who cross borders. Okies emigrated from Oklahoma and immigrated to California. PERIOD !!! Migrants within the USA !!!
People like you, Tosh, implicitly alibi people like Viktor Orbán, who reclassifies desperates as migrants [‘migránsok’] in order to salve whatever conscience the Hungarian population may have while being hardassed racists.
MAGYARKOZÓ
One small difference:
All thes people in your example are US citizens – but there is a certain difference between a British, a German and a Hungarian citizen…
And I’m not talking about the language!
PS:
Isn’t it one of the objectives of the nationalistic Hun govenment (and the other V4 members) to reduce the EU to an economic union again and make the different “nations” stronger and more independent?
Their motto re the EU:
We’re only in it for the money!
Re: ‘migransok’
Has that pejorative ring to it as it picks up semantic relationships to ‘unworthy’, ‘ignoble’ and also with an allusion to ‘mutate’ from the Latin ‘mutare’ which is ‘change’.
And a great ‘change’ certainly has occurred in the country. Significant ‘mutations’ appear now in government and the people. If things keep up juries decades from now will have to assess what to make of a country if it still can’t understand what it means to be a human being together with the aspirations residing in their short lives.
At this time the only people who would stay are those who are trapped and do not have the means to leave and those who feel they are living in blooming days of wine and roses. ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes and I will pledge with mine’. The former no doubt are disillusioned. The latter poisoned with drink and Fidesz valentines. Their illusions could hold a fall.
And life’s just a ‘Cabaret!’..😎 It aint there alright but there’s a whiff coming in.
A story illustrating this: In Konstanz at the lake between Germany, Austria and Switzerland there is a company (Hungarian owned) which brings in workers from Hungary like hairdressers, manicurists, nurses etc. It organises jobs and living quarters for them, helps with the “paper war” and gets good money for this from the employers … A friend of ours was invited to try this out and worked for a few days – for personal reasons she returned but still feels sorry about it. She told my wife that just the tips she got as a hairdresser were much more than she makes in Hungary but … Others went and will not return – one couple gave their child a “non Hungarian name” even. When my wife asked them why they didn’t call their son Csaba or Ferenc they said: We don’t want our boy to have a strange name – when he enters Swiss school … Many of the workers now live in Germany but work on the other side of the border – in Switzerland wages are even higher … Do these numbers of emigrants include those people who work for some time in DACH and return regularly, but are… Read more »
“highly qualified academics, etc. [are] leaving in drones”
Wouldn’t it be better to travel via commercial jets, Wolfi?
MAGYARKOZÓ
“People leaving in drones”
That’s an old english expression – much older than the drone-concept in flying machines … 🙂
Funnily enough it’s often used by conservatives, sorry right wingers, to describe migration processes …
PS:
There are a lot of mini-buses running between Hungary and DACH, often without an official licence, cheaply transporting workers back and forth.
Your capability with English is commendable, Wolfi. however sometimes semantic glitches arise. In this case, you messed up the English idiom ‘leaving in droves’. At first I thought that it was because of a typo that you used ‘drones’, however I now realize that your requisite idiom was wonky.
MAGYARKOZÓ
So it might be a misspelling – but I’m not the first one to use it …
Don’t remember where I first read it – must have been some time ago 🙂
Thanks anyway!
Even at my (over)ripe old age of 75 I’m still learning!
The first question that comes to mind is, “Whom should I believe?” The figures quoted in the blog now are very different from the numbers the Orban/Fidesz machine admits to. On balance, after the repeated lies of the Orban government on almost any subject, one simply must assume their figures are completely unreliable. The ripples spread widely because, we are told, the economy is doing well (more lies?), but they don’t say whose economy – Lorinc Penztaros has now sequestered approaching a billion Euro for himself and his master and the Orange Files report on autocrats:
https://theorangefiles.hu/2018/06/21/new-istvan-garancsi/
(for example) shows that for the chosen few, the Hungarian economy is booming – through government-organized theft from EU and public funds (Garancsi building football stadiums with money stolen from pensioners, remember?). But there is one truth that Orban can’t avoid, try as he might:
People Are Voting With Their Feet By Leaving Corrupt, Prospectless HUNGARY.
On the other hand the stats for 2018 re those hordes of migrants entering Hungary:
Hungarian statistics show 3,555 refugees living in Hungary, a country of 10 million, as of April. Only 342 people were registered as asylum seekers in the first four months of this year, mostly from the Middle East, and 279 were approved.
Hungarians must be very unsure about their culture to be afraid that these large numbers of migrants might destroy it … 🙂
For who hasn’t checked yet, I like to bring an infogram titled “V4(+) citizens working abroad (2008-2017, eurostat)” to the attention, which I recently made.
It shows the trends in EMIGRATION for the V4(+) countries and the EU average starting from 2008 on, the curve/trend for Hungary differs strongly from the others: https://infogram.com/38d55ce9-e93b-4b76-aa8b-7b4890a4cf57
From 2015 to 2017 the EMIGRATION out of Hungary has slowed down, as Portfolio.hu notes a serious factor for this seems to be Brexit, so an external factor.
I expect future data to return to the 2012-2015 trend, based on all signs I have received from media and people in Hungary. Several people have personally told me at the beginning of this year to await the election result, after that they explained me to see NO FUTURE anymore for themselves and their families in Hungary, and asked me to collect info for them about settling and working in Western Europe.
Re: ‘NO FUTURE’
This playwright has it right:
‘Time enough to think of the future when you haven’t any future to think of’. Bernard Shaw
Magyar emigration theme: Slim pickings concentrate minds wonderfully. They tell their stories walking. So they can rock on.
Chers Collegues: Lots o’ peeple hev left for sure… The EU enabled THIS to occur. It seemed evident to me from the start. What suprises ME is that NOT MORE people have left!!! – That not MANY more people are leaving !!!!!!! And THAT says a LOT about Hungarian society !!!!! After all, within a few years the Hungarian State has become in effect a dictatorship or sorts… Do any of our non-troll readers doubt that??? Surely you have read in these columns what has occurred and within a most surpisingly short period of 8 years !!! ’Be-BETONOZOTT rendszer’ (System ancored in heavy reeinforced contrete !!!!!!!!!! In case anyone still has ANY doubts… you’ll need to re-read the facts in black-and-white or reexamine and refocus your impressions. I would like to read an article in the Hungarian Spectrum on what can be realistically expected tomorrow and beyond. Less on the past of Hungarian emigration – that is, the result of Europa and Hungary’s uneasy relationship but rather what kind of prognosis we can make for the future. The options may be many and they are all interesting. They all deal with a process that is coercive by the Orban System.… Read more »
Here is a Hungarian friend’s response to this article. Given his understanding of the movement of people in Hungary, I think he would consider the above unnecessarily alarmist. Comments? International migration is a fascinating topic and THE defining process of our times in my opinion, but this article (as well as most of the media) paints an entirely inaccurate picture of what is going on. Before delving into specifics, let me point out that in an increasingly globalized world with low costs of travel and communication, it is an entirely unreasonable expectation that a person would find the best place for applying their talents anywhere near the arbitrary location where they happened to be born. Migration is a natural and generally beneficial process for all involved and even those not involved. Whether or not a country is an attractive place to live cannot be judged merely on the emigration statistics; one needs to put it next to immigration statistics. On that account, Hungary is fine. The net migration balance of Hungary has been slightly positive for many years and remains so to this day. You are welcome to check the actual numbers from CIA World Factbook or any other source.… Read more »
Well-written, a pleasure to read. You didn’t say whether your friend reads or speaks English, whether your friend lives in Hungary, whether your friend supports Fidesz.
Right off the bat, you are wrong about the population, which is currently about 9.8-million people. Hungary’s population was more than 10 million between 1962 and 2010. • • • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hungary#Births_and_deaths • • • Where did you get the idea that the “net migration balance of Hungary has been slightly positive for many years and remains so to this day”? Either you are deluded or your friend is deluded or you both are deluded.
I’m from Toronto, where I lived for six decades. I now live in Csepel. I tell Hungarians I meet that Hungary is the whitest country I have ever been in. I’m sure that your statement about the racial harmony in your condo development is accurate, however that aint Hungary.
My exgirlfriend, a teacher in Budapest XX, a Fidesz supporter, is antiRoma and she’s proud of it. So it goes in Hungary. Your final paragraph, stating that things are improving in Hungary, might be a tad too optimistic.
MAGYARKOZÓ
Regarding your questions – I wrote only the preamble. I’m a torontonian. My friend who wrote the response is a Hungarian living in Budapest who speaks and writes excellent English. Regarding his net migration balance claim, go to CIA World Facebook and look for Hungary, and you’ll find that the net migration for Hungary is 1.3 per 1,000 so my friend is correct in this claim. Whether such a number can be interpreted as a healthy one (by comparison, Canada’s is about +6!), I leave it for those more experienced in number crunching to decide. BTW, I read this blog to better understand Hungary, not to merely confirm existing views.
The CIA numbers (around 13 000 people for last year) probably include all the Ukrainians and Romanians with Hungarian roots.
Anyway the situation that your friend desribed re Budapest is totally different from what happens in the country.
PS:
Would be interesting to see the CIA numbers for earlier years – is this possible?
Tappanch to the rescue! 🙂
• • • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hungary#Births_and_deaths • • •
It’s not for nothing that I provided the above link, which is more comprehensive than your CIA WF [Hungary]. Checking it, you will learn that Hungary’s population peaked in 1980 [10.7 million], decreasing steadily thereafter, hitting 10 million in 2010. It has decreased since then. Each year of the decrease there have been more deaths than births.
Your friend may be correct in claiming that there is a NET INCREASE of immigration to Hungary (compared to emigration from Hungary), a figure that I find suspect, however there is a defacto NET POPULATION DECREASE.
What your friend ignores, or does not realize, is that the emigration is highly skilled, while the immigration is less skilled, mostly labor. The result is a bonafide drainage of intellect from Hungary.
MAGYARKOZÓ
Hungarians die early (especially the men, just like in the USA – compared to the developed part of the EU) and produce not too many children – that alone means a loss in population which mightbe (partially) compensated by immigration from the even poorer parts of the Balkan (end ofprovocation).
There are about 100 000 births and 150 000 deaths per year – as I wrote before, Tappanch surely can find the exact numbers, my Hungarian is not good enough for the bureaucracy of this … 🙂
What’s never included in those stats is however the large number of people officially still resident in Hungary which are working part or all of the year in the neighbouring states, essentially DACH.
If the Wiki link info is accurate (that’s always a consideration when looking for hard data there), then you are correct and there is a net decline in population numbers by about 40k per year. And I suspect you are also correct concerning the skill/training levels of these emigrating versus those immigrating – that data would make very interesting reading. With the latest election results, it’s likely that the emigration numbers will further increase.
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Demographics_of_Hungary
I’m a lot less jaundiced about Wikipedia than you, Dusty Dale, as evidenced by your suggestion that “[accuracy is] always a consideration when looking for hard data there”.
I’m not jaundiced in the least. I think that Wikipedia is a beautiful thing and I’ve said to many that it should win a Nobel Prize somehow for what it represents: a repository of easy-access data on a great variety of topics.
Given the many 100s of thousands of topics, there are very few errors, of which there are two major kinds: inadvertence and vandalism. The latter is usually dealt with by means of lockdowns: partial or total denials of access. The following is an example of a wikilockdown:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump
The accidental inclusion of mistaken data eventually gets dealt with through the communities participating with respective topics. If you hit the link, you will learn that Demographics of Hungary has been edited more than 1000 times by more than 330 individuals. Quite a spread.
I have donated to Wikipedia.
MAGYARKOZÓ
http://qb5cc3pam3y2ad0tm1zxuhho-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Erdogan-Portrait-1024-600-1024×600.jpg
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/22/dont-trust-anybody-about-turkeys-elections … ERDOǦAN: NO TRUST [FOREIGN POLICY]
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a hero to Viktor Orbán, has been in power 15 years. Turkey is holding elections Sunday. This Foreign Policy article points to the similarities between politics in Turkey and in Hungary, the difference being that Erdoğan could lose.
MAGYARKOZÓ
Just watched some reports from Turkey:
*no official results yet (less than 40% counted now)
*public/state media are mentioning victory for Erdogan and his party(and claiming based on 96% count)
*Erdogan started giving victory speeches, based (in his words) on his own unofficial data
*opposition is mentioning fraud, fully different data according their own sources and election observers
*the official election website is unreachable (don’t know if broken down or just too much interest)… where happened such recently… seems infectious…
Probably more important than the volume of Hungarian migrants to core EU nations, is who are the people migrating. Eva has written on this several times over the years as have others and discussed how many higher academically performing Hungarians are to use the American phrase -getting the hell out of Dodge (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=get%20the%20hell%20out%20of%20dodge ). Many of the contributors to this blog who are highly educated live in the Hungarian diaspora globally. The statistics Eva presented in her essay have been know within Hungary by data analysts for some time, even by Fidesz ideologues. So in 2013 the madman Gyorgy Matolcsy, governor of the Central Bank, spoke of half a million Hungarians leaving their homeland in recent years, which constituted about 5 percent of Hungary’s population of 10 million. That is pretty close to the 600,000 figure cited in Eva’s essay. Many of us know anecdotally from our own families since transition and ascension to the EU how many university students thought about their educations in terms of western marketability if for no other reason than to reap the salary advantages. Without question this has had an impact on Hungarian civil society. This article published in April in the business news… Read more »