Introduction

In the last few years in Hungary, a serious interest has arisen concerning emigration intentions and processes related to emigration. This chapter deals with youth intentions to study and work abroad, as well as with retaining and motivating factors based on large-scale Hungarian youth research conducted by Kutatópont Ltd in 2012 (Kutatópont 2013). Hungary's growing involvement in migration triggered dramatic processes after 2007, and even more so after 2010. This chapter presents those processes and trends, highlighting and analyzing the changes brought about by the transition of regimes and the migration dynamics of the recent period.

Due to the uncertainties and validity problems of data in migration statistics, the official and valid administrative data that is available is extremely incomplete. This mainly stems from the lack of international and domestic migration statistics, so the mirror statistics of host countries are used for examination of migration processes. However, even these statistics are unsuitable to explore the actual underlying causes behind emigration, emigration duration, and other matters. Nevertheless, migration research essentially intends to indicate precisely what changes can be expected or predicted, changes that have considerable socioeconomic and demographic consequences for both the sending and the host countries.

Migration trends in Hungary

In former socialist countries, the change of regime led to the elimination of the restrictive emigration policies and the eradication of obstacles to traveling abroad; the borders became permeable and political control over migration disappeared. As a consequence, the intensity of migration in these countries increased significantly in the early 1990s. New forms of mobility also became typical and acceptable, such as short-term, income-oriented movements in the late 1990s and early 2000s for which the international literature coined the terms pseudo-tourism, quasi-migration, and unfinished migration (Gödri and Tóth, 2010). After the fall of the Iron Curtain, some analysts termed the group of countries including Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia as a buffer zone between East and West (see Wallace et al, 1996; Wallace and Stola, 2001), while today, after joining the European Union (EU), the region of the “buffer zone” countries, along with Romania, have become the EU's periphery.