The other day I overheard two young women argue on how they could retrieve an account statement from a touch-screen operated ATM. The same day, a Hungarian waiter walked up to our table in a restaurant when he overheard our conversation in Hungarian. So the Hungarians are everywhere: they work as cleaners in hotels, study at universities, and you meet them as doctors or receptionist. Once I started counting how many of them I meet a day but then I gave up.

Nobody knows the number of Hungarians in London and their number in the whole of the United Kingdom is an ever greater mystery. Being citizens of the European Union, Hungarians need no visa or work permit, so what could statisticians rely on? The Brits have few nationwide stats anyway, let alone figures broken down for nationality – at least as the state authorities are concerned.

One thing is certain: tens of thousands of Hungarians apply for the national insurance (NI) number yearly because they are indispensable for taxation, health care and, eventually, pension care. Once you have got an NI number, you can keep it for the rest of your life. That applies even if you have only spent a few months here on a grant or if you used to be the spouse of a Brit, have since divorced and returned to Hungary. Some observers put the number of Hungarians with a NI number close to 700 000.

Perhaps half of them are currently working/studying in the island country, mostly in London and its environs. Only 1956 is comparable to the rush that followed Hungary’s joining the European Union. As between 1957 and 1989 there were no other waves of immigration of Hungarians, in the United Kingdom there is no deep division between groups of Hungarian immigrants unlike in Brazil or Argentina.

The year 2004 was a milestone but only last year did I feel for the first time that the number of Hungarians living here had reached a level high enough for Hungarians not only to look for jobs of any kind but for jobs connected to other Hungarians. In other words, the Hungarian community has grown big enough to make it cost-efficient to launch ventures that provide some service the Hungarian community. (The Poles living in the United Kingdom reached that level in about 2005-2007.)

Actually there are several companies specializing in Hungarian customers: for example, parcel services, computer repair firms, law offices, psychologists, house painters, cabinet makers and confectioners. In the first wave upon Hungary’s joining the European Union mostly highly qualified Hungarians came, who spoke English well. But nowadays Hungarians also arrive without speaking English or having any useful qualification.

f you have at least some English, or manage to pick up some fast, you can find a job as a cleaner, a domestic health carer, a restaurant assistant, and seasonal jobs in agriculture are always available almost ad lib. True, those jobs are not paid well. Those having such a job usually have to rent an apartment or house jointly with others in some suburban district of London.

Unlike immigrants from other countries, the Hungarians prefer living far from each other and not in clusters. And unlike, for instance, the Poles, they rarely help one another. Worse, some Hungarians even attempt to deceive the inexperienced newly arrived fellow Hungarians by promising non-existing jobs and/or accommodation for a fee.

Unlike the “fifty-sixers” – who once fled Hungary without the hope to return and so were quick in adjustment – some of the recent Hungarian immigrants consider their stay in the United Kingdom temporary and focus on making money. As they come from various backgrounds and with various motivations, generalization is difficult. It is even difficult to tell what the “typical” work they do is. While the Poles found jobs in the construction industry in large numbers – there are even jokes about the Polish plumber – Hungarians are spread thin among a wide array of jobs.

You can find among them architects, corporate managers, heads of bank departments, medical researchers, opera singers, hospital nurses, waiters and cleaners. In sum, the Hungarians in London are a heterogeneous crowd except for one thing: they don’t define themselves as emigrants. Nowadays people are free to choose where they wish to live, and the United Kingdom is ready to accept and tolerate them.

Source: HVG

Translated by Budapest Telegraph