Almost Twice as Many Foreigners Live in Hungary as at Turn of Millennium

Hungary Today 2022.02.08.

The number of foreign nationals immigrating to Hungary within a year increased from the stable 20-25,000 per year to over 55,000 in 2019, and then dropped below 44,000 in the first COVID year (2020). However, twice as many foreigners live in Hungary today as at the turn of the millennium: almost 200,000, as can be seen from the data of the Hungarian Demographic Research Institute, reports Népszava. The percentage of people who left the country is 7.3%, which is a very good figure compared to other countries, as 20-24% of Latvians, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, or Romanians, among others, live and work abroad.

This article was originally published on our sister-site, Ungarn Heute.

Foreigners in Hungary

In 2016, the Hungarian government passed a measure allowing people from neighboring countries to work in Hungary without a special permit if they wanted to find a job in occupations experiencing employee shortages. This may be one of the reasons why almost half of all foreign citizens in 2019 came from four neighboring countries: Ukraine, Slovakia, Serbia, and Romania. In 2020, this share dropped to 35 percent due to the epidemic, as only 13,000 Ukrainian workers entered the country in 2020, while this number was 21,000 in 2019. However, the number of Slovak nationals who moved to a Hungarian residence to continue their previous work near the border, quadrupled. If we consider not only the nationals from neighboring countries, one-third of the people arriving in Hungary are still Germans, and one-quarter are from Asia.

Fact

71,000 foreigners came to the country to work, almost 29,000 to study, 33,000 want to settle here permanently, and more than 23,000 came to join their families, but the purpose of 33,000 foreigners living here is unknown to the Hungarian authorities, according to the Hungarian newspaper Népszava. Meanwhile, only 5,110 people were granted international protection in the country in 2021.

Hungary abroad

The statistics on Hungarians who left the country show favorable changes. The percentage of people who left the country is 7.3%, which is a very good figure compared to other countries, as 20-24% of Latvians, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, or Romanians live and work abroad. KSH data shows that since 2016, on the one hand, fewer people went abroad to work than in previous years, and on the other hand, more people returned to Hungary in 2019.

Problems with Foreigner's Immunity Certificates: PMO Head Says Gov't Offices Can Help

Without a Hungarian passport or identity card, the National eHealth Infrastructure database cannot register foreign citizens for their immunity cards.Continue reading

In the past decade, there were years when 20,000 Hungarians received a social security number in the U.K. By 2020, there were only 4,500. (Probably mostly because of Brexit).

The authors of the demographic portrait clearly underscored that in the last twenty years, the total number of immigrants to Hungary has exceeded the number of those leaving the country every year.

Népszava adds:

More than 490,000 Hungarian citizens live in the countries of the European Economic Area (in addition to EU member states, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland), 400,000 of whom have left the country since the turn of the millennium. According to the UN, a total of 714,000 people born in Hungary live in 64 countries around the world, regardless of when they left Hungary.”

Source: Népszava

Featured image via Pixabay