Asian guest workers are flocking to Hungary
The Hungarian government also supports Asian guest workers to ease labour shortages. More and more Asian guest workers are arriving in Hungary, while the anti-migration propaganda is booming.
According to G7.hu, although the coronavirus pandemic has slowed down the increment of the number of foreign workers and immigrants arriving in Hungary, their overall numbers have been rising at an astonishing rate in recent years. Meanwhile, the composition of guest workers working in Hungary is also changing rapidly.
It seems that the “migrant propaganda” is just a sham, as the portal writes, a communication stunt. In fact, the Hungarian government has entered the global race for Asian labour, perhaps best illustrated by a decree that came into force last September to encourage large numbers of workers from the Far East.
Countries from where workers are coming
The news portal also adds that recently, more and more workers from India, Vietnam and the Philippines have been arriving in Hungary.
As we can read in Napi.hu’s article, in recent years, the National Employment Service (Nemzeti Foglalkoztatási Szolgálat, NFSZ) has published annual summaries on the subject, which show that the number of foreigners working in Hungary increased significantly between 2015 and 2020:
from almost 17,000 in 2015 and 2016, the figure was close to 70,000 in 2019, and then fell to just over 36,000 in 2020, but this may already include the impact of the pandemic.
If we put the annual reports side by side, we can see that workers are arriving in Hungary from more and more countries. For example, in 2020, 131 Syrians, 194 Pakistanis, 208 Nigerians, 426 Filipinos and 630 Moldovans were granted work permits. However, Vietnam tops this list with 5140 workers, almost 2,000 more than China in second place and about double the number of South Korea in third place.
Qualifications
According to G7.hu, 45% of those working in casual employment do simple, unskilled work.
About half of them have a primary school education and 18% have a vocational secondary school education. Just over 40% are in administrative and service support jobs, and 13% work in the construction sector.
The number and proportion of migrant workers from within the EU have fallen, while the number and proportion of migrant workers from Asia, including Vietnam, South Korea and India, have increased in recent years, and even the arrival of large numbers of Ukrainian migrant workers did not change this.
Source: G7.hu, Napi.hu