Can you name the venue of the live concert that Hungary’s prominent performers Charlie, Ferenc Demjén, and Tamás Somló gave on March 15, Hungary’s national holiday? The answer is Clapham Grand, a live music establishment in London. For some time now, Hungarian celebrity performers from Erika Zoltán to DJ Sterbinszky have been regularly visiting the British capital. It’s not that the English have become their fans; it’s just that there are enough Hungarians living in London to make organizing gigs for them a worthwhile enterprise.

No one knows the real emigration numbers. How you see the situation depends on your personal impressions. If many of your friends and family have left, or if you happen to know many young persons in their twenties and thirties, you may feel that half of Hungary is already in London while the other half is checking cheap flights. Otherwise the often-heard comment “everyone is leaving” might strike you as mere alarmism.

But what do we know for a fact? Last year, British ambassador to Hungary Jonathan Knott stated that London was the fifth largest city in terms of its Hungarian inhabitants, adding that it is also the second biggest Estonian and the sixth biggest French city. With 156,000 inhabitants, the fifth most populous city in Hungary is Pécs; accordingly, the ambassador’s statement will only be true if the number of Hungarians living in London is higher than that.

Three types of data are indicative of the number of Hungarians living in the UK: the number of consular cases, British statistics, and data from neighboring countries. Neither of these is, however, accurate; the statistics are not comprehensive, and most of the Hungarians living abroad never use any consular services.

How many are they?

Over the past ten years, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) registered almost 100,000 Hungarians of age. While these statistics do not include either underage family members or adults working in unregistered jobs, they do include Hungarians who have in the meantime returned to Hungary.

The 2011 British census listed 44,000 persons who declared Hungarian as their mother tongue in England and Wales; at the same time, the migration statistics of the National Archives has records on 48,000 people born in Hungary. If we add ethnic Hungarians registered as immigrants from Romania and Slovakia, we get an estimated 150,000 for the entire territory of the United Kingdom.

Even if 100,000 of them have made their homes in and around London, calling the British capital Hungary’s fifth biggest city is an exaggeration; the ninth or tenth place may be more realistic. The Facebook group Londonfalva (“London Village”), which plays an important role in organizing London’s Hungarian community, has over 22,000 members.

The loss through emigration of over 100,000 mostly young people means for Hungary may be compared to the wave of emigration after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Then, 170,000 people left Hungary. Today, the situation is much worse, the UK being just one of the many destinations Hungarian emigrants are heading to.

Not all Hungarians in the UK are recent immigrants. While the statistics do not distinguish between the members of the post-1956 generation, now retired, and those who made the move just a few years ago, indirect indicators suggest that emigration has gained momentum over the past few years: the number of consular cases increased from 1,800 in 2002 to 11,000 in 2012, while NHS registered 16% more Hungarians in 2012 than in 2011.

With 18,000 newly registered persons just last year, Hungary has become one of the top ten countries contributing immigrants to the UK. This seems to support public opinion: the stream of Hungarian emigration started to trickle after the country’s EU accession in 2004, not reaching the high numbers of other Eastern European countries for a long time. However, after 2010, the stream swelled into a river right when the flow of immigrants from the other countries of the region started to dwindle. The flood of Hungarian emigration may be expected to peak in 2012-13 before the trend turns around; by then, the most mobile will have left.

Yet the willingness to emigrate remains high. Research findings by Ipsos opinion research firm indicate that one third of the young generation is planning to find employment abroad. Tárki has found that half of all adult Hungarians under 30 would be willing to make the move. The research program Hungarian Youth 2012 found that 49% of young Hungarians would try their luck abroad. These plans are not always realized, and most thinking about working abroad plan to come home after a while; at least that is what they say before they set off.

Leaving isn't quite that easy though. Spending the last bit of your savings on a one-way ticket and hoping to find a job within a couple of days is the worst possible idea. True, there was a period between 2005 and 2006 when, with a bit of luck, anyone could quickly land a job in one of London’s cafés or bars, but the crisis has put an end to that.

Setting off on a journey to the unknown

“Coming here without at least an intermediate level of English is a waste of money; today, it is almost impossible to find work without language skills,” explains László Szabó, a Hungarian entrepreneur based in London who rents rooms to Hungarians in the British capital. His firm maintains an office in Budapest where those contemplating emigration are offered advice, can sit for language assessment tests, and receive help in correcting and improving their CVs. “What we tell everyone is that they should have enough money to cover their accommodation, meals, and travel costs for three to four weeks; no one should leave without at least GBP 400 to 600,” he adds.

Those blindly trusting their good fortune might easily end up knocking on the gate of the Hungarian embassy of London in despair. Two to three people a week contact the consulate asking for money to travel home because they have not been able to find employment and cannot afford a ticket home. However, the Hungarian state only grants consular loans to those tourists whose money and passport have been stolen.

If one’s plans don’t work out and there is no one back home who could send money, all the embassy can do is show the nearest shelter in London. But there is worse than that. Many complain about “employment agents” charging them tens of thousands of forints as a “registration fee” and promising a secure job. It is often blue collar workers with no language skills who find themselves at an airport without anyone waiting for them, and all they have is the first name and the phone number of the person who conned them.

Employment agents should never be paid up front. A convincing and detailed website is no guarantee either as these sites often disappear after a week or two. The best idea is to meet up with Hungarian acquaintances that are willing to put us up for the first few weeks.

“Over the past ten years, we have let rooms to 40,000 Hungarians. There are another two major firms that also offer accommodation in London. We let rooms to people for three to six months; we ask them to pay on a weekly basis. We are interested in tenants with a job, so we help them cut through the red tape and look for employment, but we cannot guarantee anything,” says Szabó, who manages 130 properties all around London, most of which he also rents from their proprietors.

Szabó used to be the proprietor of a disco club and pizzeria outside Szeged, Hungary, which was burned down; after the incident, he arrived in London with just GBP 60 in his pocket, working three shifts and starting all over again from scratch. “After 2004, it was mostly young people who came; over the past two to three years, it’s mostly couples in their 30s and 40s along with their children.

We encounter desperate people who took out loans to finance their trip and feel that London is their last chance,” he says. Even with luck, finding employment takes at least two weeks, the entrepreneur says; however, only one out of ten people his company helps fail to land a job eventually.

It's not all gravy

While there are great job opportunities for certain professionals such as, for example, physicians, most Hungarians are hired in catering, in the hotel industry, in construction, or as drivers. Most London Hungarians we asked told us that the first couple of months had been really hard.

Almost all of them spent nights in community accommodation facilities, in hostels, or “couch-surfing” at Hungarian acquaintances. “One of the rooms we rented was just half a room partitioned off with a hanging bed sheet, with strangers sleeping on the other side,” remembers Gergő. It took him and his girlfriend six years of work to be able to rent an English-style row house in a tranquil suburb.

“For over a month, I slept on the couch at a childhood friend’s house. They didn’t kick me out, but when the landlord came to check on them, I had to leave regardless,” Marcsi Vas shares with us after two years’ of work experience in London. “As soon as I found a job I moved into a rented apartment; luckily, even a minimum wage is enough to cover the rent, which is typically GBP 60 to 80 a week.

What you must be prepared for though is that the apartments are in a very poor state of repair; infested with rodents and roaches, the buildings are structurally rickety, with obsolete infrastructure and worn-out furnishing. I lived in a place where ten people shared a single bathroom,” she adds. “I lived in 15 different hostels; I lived in mass accommodation facilities; and, in the first five weeks, I lived on the couch of a friend in the corner of half a room. At times, I only had enough money to pay for a bed in a hostel with nine beds in a room.

Translated by Budapest Telegraph.

Source: Heti Válasz