Last year, for more than 6 months we have been researching the infrastructures supporting university students arriving in Hungary in the framework of the ReRoot project. Through interviews, an online survey and moving into a dormitory, we produced a detailed analysis. The summary of this analysis can be read here. Special thank you to those university management members, administrative staff who allowed this work to take place.
Executive Summary
For the past decade there has been a new form of immigration regime emerging in Hungary. The Hungarian Government’s tearing down the asylum system, as well as its developing the Stipendium Hungaricum program in higher education are probably the two most characteristic elements of this process. Launched in 2013, Stipendium Hungaricum (SH) is a large-scale scholarship system that allows international students to enroll in about six hundred degree programs in twenty-nine institutions across the country. These foreign students not only avail tuition-fee free education in English language but also receive living and housing allowances. Currently, there are 12,300 scholarship holders from almost 90 countries with a significant number of them coming from Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Nigeria, Kosovo, Yemen and Ethiopia. These are the same countries from where refugees once fled and were seeking asylum in Hungary.
Even though, scholarship recipients do not consider themselves as refugees but unlike other types of foreign students in Hungary, beneficiaries of SH have a lot in common with refugees originating from the same countries. Scholarship holders often mention similar push factors (motivations to leave) that refugees talk about: social inequality, gender-related cultural conflicts, social pressure, lack of freedom, tension, war, political atmosphere, poverty, and lack of opportunities. A strong motivation to move away from home is evident in the interviews with students, and further reflected in the plans to prolong their stay in Europe. It is important to note that scholarship holders consider their arrival in Hungary as their arrival in Europe, and this notion is supported by the promotional materials of the program too.
The main participants of our study are SH scholarship holders enrolled in Miskolc University and Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest). We adopted a mixed methods approach to study the experiences of SH beneficiaries in these universities located in two different cities of Hungary. Participant observation and interviews were supplemented with social media analysis, a nation-wide survey, and mapping exercises. Our data generation activities started in October 2021 and lasted till August 2022. In addition to interviewing students, we also conducted semi-structured interviews with the officials of the universities and Tempus Foundation (organization responsible for coordinating the scholarship program). We reached out to the dormitory management and employers that hire international students.
It is important to understand the broader context in which this form of student migration is experienced. Stipendium Hungaricum is a state-sponsored program. However, we find the Hungarian government in between an ideology of non-integration that it promotes through the power politics of a relentless campaign against migration, and the realpolitik of diplomatic considerations and manpower needs that are hard to address without accommodating some form of migration. Since 2015, there has been a tireless and continuous one-way political campaign that addresses the public. It opposes and stigmatizes migration and discusses it in a conceptual framework of fear, contested national sovereignty, and conflict or even war of civilizations. On the other hand, demographic trends and emigration have a considerably negative effect on both the labor market and the higher education system. Besides the long-term demographic strategies, there is a pressing need for immediate solutions and both sectors are eager to receive migrants.
It is in this context that the scholarship program has been designed to allow the state to achieve total control over the process through which this mobility takes place. A short-term residence permit is issued which is tied to one’s active student status and further stay is very much conditioned by one’s relevancy in the job market. As mentioned earlier, scholarship recipients consider their arrival in Hungary as their arrival in Europe and a significant number of international students prolong their stay in the region after graduation. By promoting Hungary as an arrival country, the program gives a directionality to the mobility trajectories of the student migrants.
Within its arrival infrastructure and conditions, the educational program itself can affect the possibility of further mobility and migration plans. For example, IT, economics, or business administration students have a higher chance of finding internships and job opportunities. Without speaking Hungarian, career opportunities are way more limited in other areas like agriculture, science, and humanities. In addition, the location of the university matters a lot. Our online survey and the focus group interviews conducted in rural towns show that the satisfaction level of international students is lower compared to students living in Budapest or other bigger cities.
Our research has identified a set of factors that create diversity in the students’ individual infrastructures: country of origin, family, location, field of studies, degree level, housing, and language. Their combinations and connections create a certain situationality, in which immigration takes place.
The research has also mapped all the places, institutions, policies, services, human connections, actions, and communicational forms that are relevant in foreign students’ everyday life in Hungary. Our mapping model identified certain layers, or rather concentric circles of these institutional arrival infrastructures. There is an inner “built-in” layer that is related to student life in Hungary, which can be further divided into a “specific” and a “general” segment. The specific one consists of institutional features that are related only to the life of foreign students, the general one is about the infrastructure that surrounds and affects all students, thus having a significant effect on foreign students’ life as well. And there is another, outer layer that consists of bureaucratic institutional structures that belong to the mainstream, but have a strong determining effect on the everyday life of foreign students in Hungary. Parallel to or rather intertwining with these there are organic, dynamic, and flexible arrival infrastructures that are rooted in the interpersonal relationships of foreign students. Some are completely informal in their origin, and some are based on interactions with representatives of the institutional arrival infrastructures, therefore the boundaries between the two dimensions (institutional and organic) are often blurry.
All in all we find that integration is very much limited to as well as defined by one’s employment and participation in the labor market. Certain policies, such as allowing international students to work up to 30 hours per week, allowing them to apply for a job-search visa after graduation, and allowing foreign-owned companies to employ foreigners up to 20% of their workforce offer a conducive environment to international students with relevant skills. However, when it comes to social relationships and the dynamic aspects of arrival infrastructure, we find that close connections with the local (Hungarian) society are rarely mentioned. Nationality, culture, the field of study, and mainly language form the framework of relationships. With very few exceptions, students prefer to share the intimacy of their temporary home with people like them. The nationality-based social media platforms support this process. It connects newcomers with each other and with senior students. Information about dormitory conditions, rental prices, and potential flat mates are available even before arrival. The roommate relations reproduce a special microclimate where students' own cultural values dominate and create a sense of comfort for them. Pakistani students continue to borrow from Pakistani friends, and Moroccan females continue to share their apartments with other Arabic-speaking Muslim females.