From improvisation toward awareness?
CONTENTS, FOREWORD
Contents
Foreword
PART I
Migration and the Actors in Migration Politics
Juhász, Judit: The Statisticai Characteristics of Migration
Labreveux, Philippe: Self-Sufficiency Through Self-Employment
Szabó, Máté: From "Catacomb" to "Civic" Activism : Transformation of Civil Right Movements in Hungary after 1989
Nyíri, Pál: Organisation and Integration in a New Overseas Chinese Community - Hungary, 1989-1997
Hárs, Agnes: The Labour Market and Migration in Hungary
PART II
Towards the European Union
Jungbert, Béla: The Management and Regulation of Refugee Affairs in Hungary in View of Accession to the European Union
Nagy, Boldizsár: The Acquis of the European Union Concerning Refugees and the Law in the Associated States
PART III
Debates on Migration Politics
Fullerton, Maryellen: Hungary, Refugees, and the Law of Return
Jungbert, Béla: Comments on M. Fullerton's Study
Fullerton, Maryellen: A Rejoinder
Világosi, Gábor: A Politician's Reflections on Hungary's Migration Policy
Nagy, Boldizsár: Can the Hungarian Migration Policy Be Moral?
Tóth, Judit: Choices Offered by the Migration Policy Menu
Tóth, Pál Péter: What Should Hungarian Migration Politics Look Like?
Szabo, Ferenc A.: Subsidiarity and Immigration Policy
Lévai, Imre: Global Migration in the World System
Appendix 1. Register of Non-governmental Organisations for Refugees
Appendix 2. The Annotated Bibliography of the Yearbooks of the Research Group on International Migration
Contributors
Foreword
Migration, by its very nature, affects politics. It involves mobile individuals, who often arrive in groups and always arrive in great and increasing numbers or so at least it is perceived in the media. Migrants cross borders and often cross cultural barriers, which in tum induces technological development and organisational innovation in police work and leads to lots of high-news value stories for the media. And, of course, migration influences the operation of basic economic institutions such as the labour market and the welfare distribution system, and even affects the most basic and slowly changing characteristics of a society such as the demographic behaviour, ethnic composition, and ethos.
Of course, there is nothing new in what we wrote in the preceding paragraph. However, there are new trends ali around the process of migration. As globalisation and regionalism, result of the weakening of nation states, go together hand in hand, as the neat (though for a time it seemed to us lethal) dual enmities between capitalism and communism disappeared and allowed unstable coalitions and internal hostilities to surface, the socio-economic characteristics of the migration process have changed.
If we reduce our focus - both in time and space - to the immediate past and to the vicinity of Hungary, we can nonetheless witness quite new and complex processes which have influenced the migration process to a great extent and we can witness changes in the composition and techniques of the migrant groups. This set of changes challenges the political actors to adapt their rules and behaviour.
Although this is far from an exhaustive list of the changes that have taken place in the past decade in and around Hungary, a few examples are instructive.
- The communist party-state was replaced by a multiparty, parliamentary system.
- The COMECON and Warsaw Treaty disappeared, and through their ruins we are marching toward the European Union and the NATO.
- Previously unknown actors appeared. Among the public authorities, new actors, such as the Ombudsman, the Audit Office and the Anti-corruption Agency were born, International organisations, for instance, the UNHCR and the EU, established local branches. Without details, we also mention the blossoming of the NGO sector, from human rights organisations to skinhead groups, from self-help initiatives to charity organisations.
- There has been mass ethnic Hungarian immigration to a country to which no one wanted to immigrate during the past few decades, and to which no one could (except by a fake marriage) immigrate. The bulk of migrants came from neighbouring Romania. Yet under communist rule the very mention of the existence of a Hungarian community in Romania was a taboo in Hungary.
- Masses of trader tourists cross through previously impenetrable borders on every day and irregular seasonal labour migration quickly became a normal way of doing business in a country where a special work-log book had been compulsory for decades.
- Non ethnic Hungarian asylum seekers appeared from the South, fleeing war and ethnic cleansing. Refugee camps were set up in a country where the last "real" refugees came during World War II and for years the term camp had meant either concentration camp or pioneer camp.
The impetus for this edition was a project to increase the awareness of the actors in the political field concerning the importance of the migration (and within it the refugee) issue. Our indirect aim is to provide ammunition for debates which we hope will lead to the maturation of a presently rather immature migration policy.
The idea for such a project carne from Mr. Philippe Labreveux, the representative of UNHCR in Hungary. For those who know him, whether as an opponent or as an ally, it is obvious that he is one of the rare movers and shakers of the world. Driven by an unrelenting desire to make things better - while fighting with the Hungarian authorities, criticising the incompetence and bureaucracy of some international organisations and endlessly trying to explain to the NGOs the importance of act ing politically - he had the energy to think BIG. Part of his BIG scheme was the launching of a campaign to educate and alert political leaders about migration and refugees.
The first part of the project focused on the Hungarian Parliament and the political parties. In the spring of 1997 Parliamentary fractions of the political parties received about 200 copies of the yearbook of the Research Group on Migration (Institute for Political Science); the yearbook had a title similar to and content that overlapped with that of this book. A workshop was then organised to discuss the main topics of migration and politics and to focus on the importance of developing a legal framework for migration. As the Parliament was going to discuss and pass a new refugee law, this was a matter of special concern.
This book, the second part of the education and awareness project, builds on past efforts but takes a broader perspective. It aims at the international actors in and around Hungary. It provides an overview of the current state of the art of the migration issue in contemporary Hungary, where the ongoing debate on accession to the European Union has assumed increased importance, International organisations and the embassies of the European states will learn from this volume, as will Hungarian officials. NGOs, and scholars.
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