Immigrants coming outside of EU

On the first of July the EU presidency is switched to Cyprus. Among the serious problems EU is facing the new presidency tries to focus on the topic immigrants coming from outside of EU countries. The Hungarian Government helps to hold various workshop discussions trough the National Family and Society institution and our Foundation was invited to take part in one of this events.
This event hosted experts from the field or migrant workers, activists from agencies, coaches, trainers and legal experts. Our common goal (social integration of migrants) made us a colorful and interesting team. The workshop’s aim is to collect our ideas on the topic and send it to Cyprus was very successful. We tried to contribute trough very precise definitions and highlighted the challenges facing our clients and friends arriving to Hungary as migrants or refugees.

The discussion material will be the base of the report sent to Cyprus. The NGO-s contributed to the report about the hope to influence the practices in Europe but also to take part on the official Hungarian level of policy making, especially on the refugee topic. As it is known, the Hungarian Immigrant Agency got serious criticism worldwide and we share some of the opinions of international stakeholders (UN, Council of Europe) but we could also tell about good practices, cooperation and let our voice heard.
We highlighted very special situation in Hungary which is the main difference between immigrant numbers. People arriving and asking for citizenship who are/were Hungarian nationalities from the territory of the neighboring countries like Romania and Serbia. They have no cultural and lingual challenges to integrate and do not require special programs. We concluded that other number of migrants is relatively small compared to other countries but their integration is very slow and the legal and bureaucratic system is not well prepared for their special needs. Hungary is still not a typical target for migrants and our attitude towards non European migrants are typically negative. Our country’s culture is not really multivariate, the religion and traditions are unique and not so tolerant. We agreed that without Hungarian language skills is very difficult to assert yourself. We agreed and promoted that without a free and state organized language course, available permanently for migrants, it’s really difficult to work on our goals and it would be necessary to formulate some sort of tolerance and anti-discrimination school program for students from the age 12-14. We believe that there is a great potential in the arriving migrants. They have special skills, they are above average educated and younger than the average Hungarian citizen.