How Migration Experience Affects the Acceptance and Active Support of Refugees? Philanthropy and Paid Work of Hungarian Migrants in the German Immigrant Service

Abstract

The paper examines migration experience and migrant solidarity within a differential migration system. The paper unfolds how Hungarians living in Germany have become involved in refugee support (either in form of voluntary or paid work), and how their engagement relates to their own experience of migration. Concerning applied methods the paper is based on a quantitative online survey and qualitative interviews.

Keywords:

• East-Central Europe
• economic migration
• Germany
• Hungary
• immigrant service
• migrants’ satisfaction
• refugee support
• transnational solidarity

Acknowledgments

We would hereby like to say thank you for the intellectual support to colleagues from Institute for Migration and Integration Research at Humboldt University, in person to Magdalena Nowicka, Wolfgang Kaschuba, Sina Arnold, and to Ludger Pries from University of Bochum, as well as Attila Melegh, Attila Papp Z and Imre Kovách migration and mobility experts in Budapest. Special thanks for collaboration to our colleagues from Research Center for Social Sciences, first of all to Márton Hunyadi who conducted the interviews in Munich, to Borbála Szakács, Eszter Kovács and Alexandra Bayer for their assistance in conducting the online survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the term philanthropy by referring to voluntary action – donations or volunteer work – carried out for the advancement of the public good. (Payton & Moody, 2008)

2 https://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Anlagen/DE/Publikationen/Broschueren/freizuegigkeitsmonitoring-halbjahresbericht-2017.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

3 Long durée scholarly work about the transnational connections between Hungary and Germany has identified continuous and intensive migratory relations between the two countries. As social historians have proven, Germany always belonged to the five most important target countries of emigration from Hungary (Melegh & Sárosi, 2016).

4 At this point it is important to note, that these results are not generalisable to the Hungarian population in Germany. Not only women were heavily overrepresented in our sample, but also – due to the online filling of the questionnaire - we might expect that the sample is strongly biased towards those strongly preoccupied by the topics of migration and asylum.

5 A person from Syria that the speaker supports.

6 The interviewee was a journalist at a Hungarian leftist daily which was closed down on the aforementioned day. At the time of interview, she was still working as a reporter.

7 Interestingly (and in contrast to Nowicka et al., 2017), in our sample gender was not found to be related either to attitudes or philanthropic practices.

8 This is a non-governmental organization which support the integration of migrants to the German society, see: https://www.oase-berlin.org/

9 Studies on solidarity actions in Hungary have shown that besides the moral incentives taking an oppositional position against the government’s hate propaganda motivated the Hungarians in aid activism, See Feischmidt & Zakariás (2019).

Additional information

Funding

The empirical research for this paper was supported by Research Centre for Social Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences especially by the Project on Social Mobility and Humboldt University by Humboldt Talent Travel Award.