This is what Hungarians do for a living in the U.K.

‘In the worst case I go to London and wash dishes’ – according to index.hu, this was plan B for several Hungarian young adults in the last years when it came to what they would do if they didn’t get a job they liked in Hungary after university. But do Hungarians really wash dishes and work as waiters in England? And do they have to fight for these jobs with Polish and Bulgarian emigrants?

The answer is briefly ‘approximately and not really’, but it is actually much more complicated. The question is answered by Chris Moreh, researcher at Southampton University’s Demographical Science Centre, in Labour Market Mirror 2015 that was published by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Moreh’s research analyses the sectors in which immigrants worked between 2007 and 2015 and is based on the British Statistic Office’s quarterly survey on the labour market. What we can tell for sure is that the majority of Hungarians and other immigrants from South European countries (joined since 2004) do work: the rate of actives is 82.5% among Hungarians and 80% among other nations. Officially, only the 4.7% of Hungarians is unemployed in Great Britain, while the other 12.8% includes students, homemakers and pensioners.