While the number of foreign-born people has increased, immigration to Hungary has been moderate over the past 20–30 years. With an intensifying labour shortage, however, the scale of immigration for the purpose of work has recently been increasing. The country has also been experiencing a migrant influx of a different demographic make up compared with immigration trends of earlier years.

In the 1990s and 2000s the most significant migrant group in Hungary was ethnic Hungarians from Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine. Recently, though, the proportion of non-European third-country nationals (especially Asians) arriving and residing in Hungary has grown: their number in fact doubled between 2010 and 2019.

In order to reach a better understanding of recent changes in the dynamics and patterns of immigration to Hungary, some small-scale qualitative research was conducted in 2019. Its aim was to identify and describe the main characteristics of recent labour migration, and this report summarises its main findings.

The report starts with a general introduction to immigration trends to Hungary. It then discusses the statistical data available on Hungary's immigrant population, and briefly describes Hungarian public opinion on immigration.

The second part of the report describes the legal and administrative environment of immigration to Hungary and outlines recent changes in immigration trends. These changes include the organic transformation of the immigrant population in terms of region of origin, and also the Hungarian government’s efforts to shape work-related immigration patterns.

Other issues discussed by the report include:

• The work visa waiver programme that Hungary has recently offered to Ukrainian and Serbian workers, and its drastic effects on the size of the immigrant population;
• Job intermediaries and immigrant workers who arrived in Hungary country through agencies;
• Thee increasing internationalisation of Hungarian higher education;
• Recommendations concerning the exploration of how the international programmes of Hungarian higher education serve as stepping stones for more permanent work migration. For this, managers of international college programmes, and workers who are current or former students of such programmes, were interviewed.

The research for this report was commissioned by the Flight, Migration, Integration in Europe Programme of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Budapest.