Channelling and filtering migration: Hungary's bilateral labour migration agreements

Abstract

New forms of mobility are being shaped in Europe which both challenge traditional explanations of mobility and contribute to popular fears of mobility. But what makes people move, and which economic indicators effectively explain migration? Does the projected migration pressure from Central/Eastern Europe actually exist? The answer to this question is often posed in terms of mainstream economic arguments concerning wage/income differences, but this offers only a partial explanation of migration. This paper considers attempts to control migration, channelling foreign labour from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe through different bilateral agreements, under different conditions, to European Union countries, as a way of admitting selected types of labour while excluding others. Surprisingly little is known about such programmes, and the paper considers who is attracted to these programmes, and the nature of the engine of this channelled labour migration? A statistical, socio‐demographic, labour‐market analysis of participants in these schemes, with special emphasis on the Hungarian case, is presented. The question is posed as to whether such bilateral agreements offer a means to control the expected European migration ‘shock’, and concludes that this is not the aim of these schemes. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How to Succeed in a Transnational Labor Market: Job Search and Wages among Hungarian, Slovak, and Czech Commuters in Austria

“…There are long‐lasting traditions of social exchange and cross‐border movements in CENTROPE. However, in accordance with the local particularities of the respective (trans‐)national labor markets, cross‐border commuting is more strongly anchored in the West Hungarian/East Austrian and West Slovakian/East Austrian labor markets (also due to a well‐established infrastructural liaison with the Vienna region) than in the South Moravian region (Czech Republic) in which a cross‐border labor market is slightly less noticeable (Fassmann and Kollár ; Hárs ; Vavrečková, Musil, and Baštýř ; Bittner, Hudler‐Seitzberger, and Neunteufl ; Huber and Nowotny ).…”