Changes in Immigration Status and Purpose of Stay: an Overview of EU Member States’ Approaches

In Section 1: Overview of national migration system in place regarding changes of status, the current Hungarian situation can be described as a system providing easily accessible, relevant and up-todate information about migration status requests and permits, but the information about status changes are insufficient. There is no difference in statistics between registering and changing migration status. The only available information is the number of migration status requests and authorization for a given period, but we have no data of cases, when the given migration status is the result of the change of a previous status. Data on migration status changes should be transparent and simple, easy to manage and accessible by both the Hungarian authorities and migrants.

In Section 2: Overview of admission criteria, the Study shows the available residence categories, its definitions and the admissions criteria. 

In Section 3: National legal framework on change of status whilst remaining on the territory of the (Member) State, the Study will show the possible status changes. This section is the core of the Study. The relevant legal background and the advantages/disadvantages of the different status can be found in this section. It must be mentioned that the legal background and the practical experiences are very complex; therefore, the Study can provide only a simplified explanation in these tables. It would be useful to prepare case studies about every status change since there are status changes, which are legally possible but do not make sense in practice. In the given way, the Study can focus on only the legal possibilities. It also should be mentioned that the enhancement or reduction of the rights are not always clear. The Study strives to highlight the practical factors in these comparisons.