Hungary had its first experience with substantial international migration in the 1990s after the fall of the Iron Curtain, especially during and after the Bosnian War and NATO’s intervention in Serbia in 1999.

Hungary’s largest “refugee crisis” to date occurred in 2015.1 Starting in May of that year, hundreds of mostly Syrian, Afghani and Iraqi citizens crossed the border from Serbia every day without valid entry documents. By June 2015, the number of entries per day had reached 1,000, peaking at around 8,000 per day in mid-September when the border fence was completed, as on 15 September, the government decided to set up a fence and close the border. Following the closure, thousands of people en route to Germany were stranded in Serbia.

Mark Zoltán Kékesi’s briefing paper maps current Hungarian migration system and policies as well as implications of those policies.

The creation of the briefing paper was kindly supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation Prague.