Labour migration from Central and Eastern Europe plays a significant role in the labour market of the European Union, yet few studies examine the direction and extent of occupational mobility triggered by migration. This study introduces a new analytical tool, the Career Benefit Index, which measures the direction of change in occupational status between the labour markets of the country of origin and the host country. The tool also enables the assessment of sociological factors that explain these changes. The index was developed using data from Hungarian workers living in Austria and Germany. The analysis revealed that educational attainment has no significant impact on career mobility. In contrast, demographic factors such as gender, age, and particularly very high-level German language proficiency strongly influence career trajectories. The index demonstrates that labour market capacities play a limited role in shaping migrants’ career paths, as the host labour markets tend to “evaluate” migrant workers primarily based on their linguistic and demographic attributes. The index and the findings contribute to a deeper understanding of labour market integration among Central and Eastern European migrants and may offer new directions for migration and employment policy analysis.

Jelen cikk az Ausztriában és Németországban élő, Magyarországon született munkavállalók karriermobilitásának vizsgálatára megalkotott karrierhaszon-mutató kialakításának lépéseit mutatja be. Az írás a szerzők által egy korábban publikált karrierhaszon-mutató továbbfejlesztését prezentálja, amivel a migrációban élő munkavállalók karrierívének a pontosabb mérése válik lehetővé. A cikk írói rámutatnak, hogy a karrierhaszon-mutató általánosan alkalmas lehet a migrációban élő magyar munkavállalók karrierhasznának – azaz a Magyarországon szerzett kvalifikáció és munkatapasztalat fogadó ország munkapiacán történő hasznosításának – elemzésére. Az írás célja bemutatni, egy olyan eszközt (karrierhaszon-mutató), aminek a segítségével elkülöníthetőek a különböző karrierhaszonnal bíró, migrációban élő csoportok, így beazonosíthatóak és összehasonlíthatóak az ebből a szempontból karriernyertes és -vesztes munkavállalói és demográfiai csoportok. A cikk a karrierhaszon-mutató alkalmazásával illusztrációképpen ismerteti, hogy a Németországban és Ausztriában élő magyar munkavállalók nagyobb része karrierveszteséget szenved. Az írás továbbá áttekinti, hogy az eszköz segítségével hogyan tárhatóak fel a különböző életkorú, nemű és különböző időben érkező magyar migráns munkavállalók karrieríveinek a különbségei.

This article examines how highly educated Hungarian migrant women living in Vienna perceive the differences between the expressive possibilities available to them in Hungarian and the communicative possibilities they experience in German and how these differences relate to their identity, emotions, social relationships, and tendencies toward self-segregation. The study is based on a qualitative secondary discourse analysis of 25 anonymised in-depth interviews collected in 2023 as part of a broader research project on women’s social and labour market integration involving participants with self-reported German proficiency of at least B2 level. The results identify three recurring patterns. Women often associate the German language with feelings of shame, insecurity, and an inability to express themselves. In the participants’ narratives, this experience is linked to identity-related tensions, a diminished sense of competence, and a subjective loss of status. Ultimately, these experiences are associated with more selective social networking, more cautious participation in German-language contexts, and a preference for Hungarian-language networks as emotionally safer spaces. The article introduces the concept of code reduction to describe this identity-related experience of expressive narrowing, interpreted not as an objective linguistic decline but as a subjective experience in which one is unable to reproduce one’s usual native-language repertoire in the second language. The study argues that the linguistic experience of migration should be understood not only as a matter of language proficiency, but also as an emotional and identity-related dimension of social integration.

This study examines the migration and labour market experiences of highly educated Hungarian mothers living in Vienna through qualitative research. We seek to understand how family migration and motherhood shape these women’s integration and labour market participation. Our findings indicate that mothers remain permanently outside the labour market, a situation stemming not primarily from structural barriers but from intertwined factors: the existential security provided by the husband’s income, traditional norms of motherhood, and the fear of social decline. Mothers’ integration does not appear as a linear process but rather follows a parallel pattern: Women connect with Austrian institutions primarily in an indirect manner by setting up a proxy integration while building strong ties within Hungarian communities, creating a self-segregating co-ethnic integration. The empirical contribution of this study demonstrated in the sample studied is to show that the labour market inactivity of highly educated migrant women is the result of complex social and psychological mechanisms. To capture this phenomenon, we introduce the concepts of “backstage integration” and “social surfing.”

Foreign employment has become one of the most visible socio-economic challenges in Central and Eastern Europe, as labour mobility increasingly reflects wage disparities, unequal life chances, labour-market tensions and perceived insecurity about the future. However, the socio-economic challenges associated with foreign employment have rarely been examined through large-scale longitudinal media data capable of measuring both agenda salience and sentiment dynamics over more than two decades. This study aims to identify how the media visibility and emotional framing of Hungarians’ foreign employment evolved between 2000 and 2021 and to interpret this discourse as an indicator of broader socio-economic challenges. The empirical analysis is based on a Hungarian online news corpus of 7,355,292 articles from 22 mainstream portals, from which 1,555 relevant articles were selected through a two-stage keyword-filtering procedure using the simultaneous occurrence of “Hungarian”, “work” and “abroad”, followed by a 2% thematic-keyword threshold. The methodology combines agenda-setting analysis, longitudinal time-series comparison, corpus linguistics, tokenisation, lemmatisation and dictionary-based sentiment analysis using the SentimentAnalysisHUN lexicon, which enabled the classification of more than 1.5 million tokens into positive, negative and neutral polarity groups. The results show a clearly cyclical and event-driven pattern of media salience: the topic reached its lowest point in 2007, increased after the 2011 opening of the Austrian and German labour markets, and peaked in 2016 during the politicisation of migration discourse. Sentiment analysis demonstrated that neutral lexical units dominated the corpus, averaging 93.6% of all tokens, which confirms the objectivity-oriented nature of hard news reporting while making relative shifts in the positive–negative sentiment gap analytically meaningful. The strongest emotional fluctuations coincided with the 2008 global financial crisis, the 2011 labour-market liberalisation and the 2015–2016 migration crisis, when working abroad shifted from an opportunity-oriented narrative towards a discourse of labour-market insecurity, wage inequality, blocked social mobility and dissatisfaction with domestic institutions. The analysis further shows that higher article frequency was often accompanied by stronger sentiment volatility, although the relationship was context-dependent rather than linear, proving that media visibility alone cannot explain the changing social meaning of labour mobility. The study contributes to migration studies, media studies and economic sociology by demonstrating that longitudinal press-corpus analysis can uncover socio-economic challenges that remain only partly visible in conventional employment statistics, while offering a replicable statistical framework for examining the interaction between media attention, sentiment dynamics and structural change in semi-peripheral European economies.