Hungarians in the United Kingdom: End of an era?

Abstract

Emigration to the United Kingdom became a symbol of the post-2004 EU enlargement migration processes in Hungary, which were increasingly characterised by the long-term outmigration of highly educated, urban youth from the early 2010s. This paper seeks to answer how the structure and social composition of intra-EU migration of Hungarians – and especially towards the UK – changed in the last decade, and how the Brexit referendum and the COVID-19 pandemic affected those changes. In doing so, a longitudinal analysis of administrative data on emigration and return migration will be carried out.

Outmigration in the 2010s reached its peak in the middle of the decade, first for the UK and later for other European destinations, then started to decline subsequently. In parallel with the growth of emigrant stocks, also the pool of potential returners increased, which made possible a consequent acceleration of return migration in the second half of the decade. As a result, however the UK has lost much of its attractiveness by today – in 2021 only 5% of Hungarian emigrants chose it as a destination – almost one in five (17%) of the returners resided previously in this country.

In addition to the changes in the volume of emigration and return migration, mobility patterns had also changed significantly in the second half of the decade shifting towards circular and short-term mobility forms. Meanwhile, the demographic base of emigration had broadened, expanding to a wider range of age and occupational composition, with the increased importance of workers in the industrial and service sectors. Although this shift can be observed in all European destinations, the UK continues to be a receiving country of younger age groups of long-term migrants, with a higher proportion of professionals and service sector workers and those emigrating from urban areas.

In addition to emigration trends, two major events in the second half of the decade had a significant impact on return migration to the UK. While the Brexit referendum has mostly stimulated the return migration of Hungarians who have been living abroad for a longer period of time and its impact can be said to be long-lasting, the Covid outbreak has caused a more temporary shift, mainly for short-term mobility, which seems to stabilise from 2021 onwards. However, the impact of the epidemic on the return migration of Hungarians living in the UK was much smaller than for those living in EU Member States, which is related to the occupational structure of Hungarians in England, the degree of integration and the low number of short-term, circular and seasonal mobility movements most affected by Covid.