Hungarian emigration refers to the manner in which people from Hungary have left their country and migrated to different parts of the world over the past two centuries or so. Prior to the nineteenth century Hungary was not a particularly densely populated country. This, when combined with its position as a landlocked region of Central Europe, did not encourage any kind of extensive migration. Matters changed in the nineteenth century and in particular from the late 1840s onwards after the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and the political crackdown in Hungary by the Austrian Empire in the decades that followed. Many Hungarians migrated to the Americas thereafter. In the twentieth century, the Cold War and the failure of the Hungary Uprising of 1956 against Soviet rule led to 200,000 refugees fleeing over the border to Austria, while membership of the European Union since 2004 has facilitated the movement of hundreds of thousands of Hungarians around Europe over the last two decades.[1]
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History of Hungarian emigration
There are three key years in the history of Hungarian emigration: 1848, 1956 and 2004. Prior to the nineteenth century, while Hungarian people moved around the wider region of the Carpathian Basin in Central Europe, often being pushed and pulled by wars with the Ottoman Empire from the early sixteenth century, there was no major Hungarian emigration to speak of. That all changed with the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. The revolt was part of a wider series of revolutions which swept across Europe that spring and summer. In Hungary the revolutionaries were anxious to gain concessions from the Austrian government and succeeded in establishing an all-but independent state for over a year. However, a brutal Austrian crackdown followed in 1849 and Hungary was placed under military occupation by Austria until the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 nearly two decades later. These events in the late 1840s triggered the first major wave of emigration from Hungary to lands further afield. Most importantly it saw the inception of the Hungarian American community as well over a million Hungarians headed across the Atlantic between the 1850s and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.[2]
The second key year in the history of Hungarian emigration is 1956. That year another great uprising occurred in Hungary. This time the oppressor was the Soviet Union, which had moved in to occupy much of Eastern and Central Europe in 1944 and 1945 as the Nazi Third Reich was conquered at the end of the Second World War. After a summer and autumn of unrest in Hungary in 1956 about the nature of communist rule in the country, the Hungary Uprising boiled over in late October. Twelve days of intense violence followed. Thousands died before the Soviets crushed the insurrection. Thereafter roughly 200,000 Hungarians fled over the border to Austria. A steady trickle of Hungarian emigres continued to escape from their homeland to the west in the decades that followed, while the opening of Hungary’s border crossings into Austria in the autumn of 1989 was the action which ultimately precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall nine weeks later.[3]
The third key year in the history of Hungarian emigration is 2004. On the 1st of May that year, Hungary was one of ten countries that joined the European Union in the biggest enlargement in the bloc’s history. With this, millions of people from the former Soviet-bloc countries in Eastern and Central Europe, Hungary included, began heading westwards to countries like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium in search of economic advancement. With access to new labor markets, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians emigrated between 2004 and the financial crash of 2008. While the flow slowed thereafter, it began to rise again in the 2010s.[4] Such has been the level of emigration from Hungary since 2004 that the country’s domestic population has fallen by about 6% from 10.2 million to 9.5 million. It would be lower still were it not for inward migration of other groups from Africa and the Middle East.[5]
The Hungarian diaspora
Any assessment of the Hungarian diaspora is complicated by the question of establishing exactly where the borders of Hungary lie. Historically the Kingdom of Hungary extended beyond modern-day Hungary to include parts of what are now northern Serbia, eastern Croatia and much of Slovakia. In particular, Greater Hungary, as it is often termed, also included large parts of Romania. The lands in question were lost to Romania as part of the Treaty of Trianon between Hungary and the Entente powers in 1920s as part of the price of Austro-Hungarian defeat in the First World War.[6] Thus, the Hungarian minority populations that exist within these neighboring countries are not really the result of emigration, as the Kingdom of Hungary once covered these regions, but nevertheless technically constitute part of the Hungarian diaspora today. There are one million ethnic Hungarians in Romania today, roughly 6% of the population of the country. The figure is even higher in Slovakia, where the half a million or so ethnic Hungarians constitute over 8% of the entire population. The Hungarian minorities in Serbia, Austria and western Ukraine are also considerable, though those in Croatia and Slovenia are minor today.[7]
The Hungarian diaspora elsewhere is much more distinctly the product of Hungarian emigration. The revolution of 1848 began a process whereby Hungarians emigrated from their homeland to the United States. By 1920 over a million Hungarians had arrived to America. They settled in particularly large numbers across the region known as the Rust Belt today, but which was then the thriving heartland of industrial America. This included states like New York, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, with Cleveland becoming known as ‘the American Debrecen’, such was the high level of Hungarian settlement here.[8] Estimates of the Hungarian American community today place the size of it at somewhere between 1.5 and 4 million people, depending on which criteria are applied.
More recent emigration from Hungary has led to large diaspora communities in Germany, Israel, France and the United Kingdom, with between 200,000 and 300,000 people of Hungarian birth or descent in each country. Elsewhere there are tens of thousands of Hungarians or people of Hungarian ancestry in countries like Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Ireland and Spain. Thus, the Hungarian diaspora today is extensive.[9]
See also
Explore more about Hungarian emigration
- Hungarian Baptisms, 1734-1895 record collection on MyHeritage
- Hungary Reformed Church Christenings, 1624-1895 record collection on MyHeritage
- Hungary Catholic Church Records, 1636-1895 record collection on MyHeritage
- New York Castle Garden Immigrants record collection on MyHeritage
- A primer on Austro-Hungarian geography at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ John Kosa, ‘A Century of Hungarian Emigration, 1850–1950’, in The American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 16, No. 4 (December, 1957), pp. 501–514.
- ↑ Istvan Deak, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849 (New York, 1979).
- ↑ John Furlow, Arpad von Lazar, Bela Molnar, Eva Molnar and Tamas Nagy, ‘Revolution and Refugees: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956’, in The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer/Fall 1996), pp. 101–117.
- ↑ http://www.ceemr.uw.edu.pl/vol-3-no-2-december-2014/articles/decade-membership-hungarian-post-accession-mobility-united-kingdom
- ↑ https://www.rferl.org/a/hungary-brain-drain-politics-jobs/32753641.html
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52903721
- ↑ Julianna Connelly Stockton, ‘Hungary, Slovakia and Romania’, in Organon, Vol. 41 (2009), pp. 51–58.
- ↑ https://case.edu/ech/articles/h/hungarians
- ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-and-emigrant-populations-country-origin-and-destination