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The first courier in Budapest I actually spoke to, as opposed to merely thanking after a late night fast food delivery, was idling on his bicycle a few blocks from the Basilica of St. Stephen on a hot summer afternoon. Dark-skinned and clearly foreign, he politely introduced himself as Mohammed Mustafa from Pakistan. He seemed unbothered by the heat, wearing gloves and pants and a long-sleeved shirt to protect himself from the scrapes and bruises that are occupational hazards for bike couriers the world over. He had some extra time, he said, because summer is a slower season in his line of work; in winter, more people stay home and order out, and there is less competition from students taking deliveries. Mohammed seemed pleasantly surprised to be speaking to a Budapester he wasn’t delivering a pizza to, so we ended up chatting for several minutes. 

Despite Hungary’s international reputation for insularity (exaggerated) and immigration restrictionism (deserved), Budapest has become noticeably cosmopolitan over the past decade. Old apartment buildings have been rescued from stately decrepitude and turned over to Airbnb. Downtown neighborhoods are littered with Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants, as well as hipper, more recent entrants, from smashburger joints to Mexican cantinas. Around fashionable hotels and expensive restaurants, veiled tourists from the Middle East are a common sight. 

The Hungarian workforce, however, remains quite homogenous. To assess a country’s dependence on cheap foreign labor, the Twitter personality Kunley Drukpa coined “The McDonalds Test.” The test is simple. Go to the nearest McDonalds. If the employees are local, congratulations, your country passes the test. Hungary passes the McDonalds test with flying colors. If you’re outside Budapest, it still helps to have a working knowledge of Hungarian when you’re craving a double cheeseburger. 

Yet even this is changing, at least in certain sectors of the economy. When app-based delivery services first became popular during Covid, the couriers were overwhelmingly Hungarian. A few years ago, this started to change. The transition was obvious because new couriers like Mohammed could only speak to customers in English and were clearly foreign, drawn from countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Vietnam. Now the streets of Budapest, capital of a country that has become an international byword for closed borders, are choked with foreign couriers delivering pizzas and tacos on a motley fleet of bikes, scooters, and vespas. For many Budapesters, app-based deliveries have shifted from a temporary, lockdown-induced expedient to a weekly or daily convenience. What happens when an aging population and an appetite for cheap labor collide with a political system that is still resistant to mass immigration? The foreign couriers servicing Budapest, who work for two or three years and then move on, are Hungary’s answer.  

I asked Mohammed where I might find more couriers to interview. “You should go to Oktogon,” he said. So I went to Oktogon.

As the name implies, Oktogon is an eight-sided intersection in the heart of downtown Pest. Delivery couriers tend to stick to the western side of the intersection because that’s where the local Burger King is, along with Bamba Marha and Zing, two slightly more upscale Hungarian competitors. The couriers are easy to spot because they congregate in groups and typically wear the electric blue livery of Wolt or the bright pink colors of Foodora, the city’s two most popular app-based delivery services. The scene at Oktogon—clusters of bike riders staring at their phones as they wait on fast food orders—would be recognizable to anyone familiar with Postmates or Uber Eats in the United States, Deliveroo in Britain, or Glovo in neighboring Romania. 

The couriers at Oktogon were for the most part quite willing to talk. The prospect of chatting to someone who wasn’t receiving an order seemed a bit of a novelty. Two of the delivery riders I spoke to were international students at Budapest universities, whose academic visas allow them to work a certain number of hours when they aren’t studying. The others were full-time. None expressed interest in permanently relocating to Hungary. Budapest was a temporary expedient, a potentially lucrative stop on a much longer journey to financial security. 

Why would someone from Pakistan or Vietnam move to Hungary to deliver fast food for a living? Mohammed’s description of life in Budapest, echoed by the couriers at Oktogon, did not sound enticing. He lives, he said, in a cramped apartment near Corvin, a not-so-fashionable part of the city, with five other foreign couriers, all of whom are Indian except for one, who is also from Pakistan. He works eight to 10 hours a day delivering food across the length and breadth of the city. Mohammed has ambitions beyond delivery work; he mentioned an MBA from an Indian university and his three years of work experience in IT. Does he want to permanently relocate to Budapest? “I’m not interested in Hungary,” he said with a smile. The language is too difficult and legal residency is hard to acquire. The goal, he explained, is to get PR—“permanent residency”—in the United States or Australia. He mentioned a brother in the British town of Ramsgate who manages a restaurant. “With PR,” he said, “you can build a business.” 

At Oktogon, a group of four couriers idling by an old kiosk also turned out to be Pakistani. The most talkative of the four, who wore a battered American University hat, sunglasses, and a wraparound neck gaiter to protect himself from the grime and dust of the city, introduced himself as Asif. Despite the forbidding headgear, Asif was a willing talker. He said he’s worked in the Gulf States and America, and the situation in Hungary compares favorably to his previous jobs. He shares an apartment with three other people but has no complaints about the living situation in Budapest, which he said is “better even than New York.” When asked about the sudden influx of foreign couriers to Budapest, Asif suggested that Covid made people turn to cheap, app-based delivery services. “This is economics,” he shrugged. “Demand and supply.” 

The Hungarian language is a formidable barrier to entry in most professions, but smartphone apps, machine translation, and the straightforward nature of delivery work have made the courier industry surprisingly accessible to outsiders. “In most of the cases, we don’t need to talk,” said Alve Palma, an international student from Bangladesh who delivers food on a part-time basis. Palma introduced himself as Frances—he is, he added, a Roman Catholic—and said that he was in Hungary studying at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Despite the summer heat, he wore a Wolt-branded jacket as he leaned against his e-bike, waiting on another order. 

In recent years, Hungarian universities that offer English classes have ramped up recruitment of students from the Middle East, Russia, China, and South and Central Asia. Many of these students have turned to delivery work. Like his full-time counterparts, Frances lives in a cramped apartment with three other people. Aside from a recent confrontation with a Hungarian who objected to him biking on a sidewalk, Frances said he’s had no serious problems with the locals. Younger Hungarians, he added, are usually able to talk to him in English. 

A few days later, another courier named Nazmul also turned out to be a Bangladeshi student at the same university. Like Frances, he has had a few confrontations with irate locals but otherwise seemed happy with life in Budapest, where he shares an apartment with three other foreign students. The two Bangladeshis didn’t complain about their work-study arrangements. It was clear from speaking to them, however, that they rarely interacted with Hungarian classmates or native Budapesters. 

Two Hungarian couriers loitering at Oktogon had a more cynical view of the business. Benedek, a goateed, tattooed delivery man in skintight bike gear, declined to give his last name but said that the newcomers had bad hygiene, gesturing by way of explanation at a foreign courier squatting in front of the nearby Burger King. Over the past few years, this has been a common complaint from restaurateurs who rely on delivery and locals on Hungarian social media. His companion Miki said he’s been working as a courier for four years and likes the freedom of the job, but is less enthusiastic about his new foreign competition. “It’s good for the company,” said Miki. “They overhire and everyone is hungry for orders.” 

András Kováts, Director of Menedék, a Budapest-based NGO that helps immigrants integrate into Hungarian society, estimates that 3–4 percent of the Hungarian workforce is now foreign. In the delivery sector, the figure is closer to 10 percent. App-based delivery services like Wolt and Foodora, which require few skills and depend on a cheap and readily available workforce, have turned out to be the soft underbelly of a country that is otherwise quite resistant to immigration.  

“This is a relatively easy entry point to the Hungarian labor market,” said Kováts. “It’s underregulated. You work through an online platform. There’s no contact with fellow workers. It’s almost like playing an online game. You don’t need sophisticated equipment. You don’t need training.” 

In downtown Budapest, the proportion of foreign couriers is much higher than 10 percent. Foreign delivery drivers tend to congregate in the city center because tourists, expats, and city-dwelling Hungarians can usually communicate in English. Bence Harrach, who turned to delivery work when Covid hit and his career as a financial adviser stalled, said he recently received a generous tip when a grateful local told him, “It was so good to speak Hungarian.” Miki, the courier I met at Oktogon, has had similar experiences. “Every week someone says ‘finally a Hungarian’,” he told me. 

Despite Hungary’s restrictive immigration laws and challenging language, there is money to be made in Budapest, a city that has gone from Eastern European backwater to international hotspot in the space of a generation. Budapesters order a lot of takeout, and in his best month Mohammed estimates he made 2,500 euros delivering food and groceries. Mohammed and couriers like him have become footsoldiers in Pakistan’s remittance economy, a model V.S. Naipaul observed over four decades ago in Among the Believers. Pakistan, Naipaul wrote, “lived not so much by its agricultural exports or by the proceeds of its minor, secondary industries, as by the export of its people.”

As of 2024, according to the World Bank, nearly 10 percent of Pakistan’s GDP came from overseas remittances. In absolute terms, the top recipient of foreign remittances in 2024 was neighboring India, which took in over $129 billion from citizens working abroad. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, four countries who have become fertile recruiting ground for Budapest’s courier services, were all among the top 20 recipients of remittances in 2024.  

When Naipaul wrote Among the Believers, the Berlin Wall was still standing and Eastern Europe’s stagnant economies had no need for foreign manpower. Decades of increasing prosperity and declining birthrates have opened new markets to guest workers from Pakistan and elsewhere. “Like accountants studying tax laws,” Naipaul wrote, “the manpower-export experts of Pakistan studied the world’s immigration laws and competitively gambled with their emigrant battalions.” The newly prosperous economies of Central and Eastern Europe have emerged in recent years as lucrative targets. 

Few couriers have plans to move to Hungary permanently, but the financial incentive to take a job on the other side of the world is fairly straightforward. Foreign workers can make thousands of euros each month delivering food, and their no-frills living arrangements allow them to send at least some of that money back home. On the Hungarian side, the story is more complicated. Despite the sudden influx of foreign couriers, Hungarians have not undergone a change of heart on mass immigration. Instead, a series of unanticipated events reshaped the economic landscape in the space of just a few years. 

From Asif, the Pakistani courier at Oktogon, to Kováts, the director of a local NGO, everyone agrees that app-based delivery services in Hungary really took off during the lockdowns.  “The whole industry got a big boom during Covid,” said Kováts. Even after Covid ended, he added, “the customer’s [quarantine] habits remained.” 

Then the Hungarian tax code changed. Before 2022, explained Kováts, “there was a peculiar form of taxation for individual entrepreneurs. It was a simplified flat tax rate of fifty thousand forint.” Once you paid the tax, a relatively modest amount equivalent to about 150 dollars, couriers could pick up as many deliveries as they liked and keep most of the proceeds. During the lockdown era, the on-demand delivery sector was a lifeline for locals who lost jobs or had to put plans on hold. Harrach, who has mostly returned to his previous career, fondly remembers delivering orders during quarantine. “All of a sudden, Covid came and everything stopped. I needed to find an alternative,” he said. “Riding the bike—it was just like therapy.”

“In 2020,” he added, “only Hungarians were delivery couriers.” When the tax code changed, “lots of [Hungarian] couriers disappeared. This is the point most Asian couriers appeared out of nowhere.” 

Although the worst of Covid was over by late 2022, Budapesters were still enthusiastically ordering from apps like Wolt and Foodora  “As the demand grew,” Kováts said, “temporary job agencies started recruiting foreigners. The companies here are in touch with immigration authorities.” These contractors arrange employment and accommodations for workers like Mohammed and Asif.  

This is a hidden feature of Budapest’s new economy. Companies like Wolt don’t actually employ the drivers their delivery business depends on. The couriers are contractors—“partners” in the corporate lingo of 21st century tech companies—who work on a freelance basis and use a company’s proprietary app to fulfill orders. Hungarian couriers can sign up for Wolt or Foodora, deliver a few pizzas, and quit any time. Foreign couriers, by contrast, are brought in by a network of contracting agencies who recruit workers overseas and then bring them to Budapest.    

“The couriers are employed by a temporary job agency and ‘leased’ by the delivery service,” said Kováts. “You can’t quit if you’re a temp worker. You’re chained to the job agency.” 

The opacity of this arrangement is what bothers Greg Tóth, a local delivery man who represents Futárok Ligája (“The League of Couriers”). Futárok Ligája is not a labor union in the traditional sense because freelance couriers aren’t subject to the typical rules and regulations of Hungarian labor law. Greg, who is hoping to turn the league into a more effective and organized advocate for Hungarian couriers, is cagey about the organization’s numbers but says the group collects dues, provides financial assistance to couriers who have been injured in the line of duty, and tries to represent the couriers’ interests in meetings with civic authorities and the delivery companies. 

I met Greg and Mark, a fellow courier who showed up to help with English translation but declined to give his full name, in front of the Basilica of Saint Stephen, a few blocks from where I first spoke to Mohammed. Greg, a big, friendly guy in a bike cap and a greying beard, has only been in the courier business for a few years. “Originally, I was a piano technician,” he said. “Under Covid, there were no concerts, no music schools. I had to figure out something to survive.” 

Greg is bothered by what he sees as a lack of accountability on the part of the delivery companies, who outsource recruitment of foreign couriers to contractors he describes as “shady.” The contractors Wolt and Foodora work with are listed on their websites, but this isn’t particularly helpful if you’re trying to understand the recruitment process. “The joke is I checked the Wolt website a year ago and it was a totally different list of [recruiting] companies,” said Greg. In one case, he continued, a recruiter that was dropped from Wolt’s roster changed its name but kept the same contact information and address as before. 

The opacity of the courier recruitment chain, which relies on foreign intermediaries to find pliant workers for delivery companies who don’t officially employ them, is a theme Greg and Mark repeatedly return to. “If there is a problem with these [recruiting] companies,” said Greg, “Wolt says ‘I am in the clear’.”  Wolt and Foodora declined to comment for this story. 

Greg agrees that changes in the tax code encouraged delivery companies to recruit foreigners, but he also thinks that broader shifts in the industry played a role. In 2022, Wolt, a Finnish company that operates in various European countries, was acquired by the American delivery behemoth DoorDash. Greg said that this change in corporate management put pressure on Wolt to cut costs by recruiting foreign couriers. It’s hard to verify Greg’s claim, but at the time of the acquisition, DoorDash was not actually profitable. In fact, the company would not report a full quarter of profitability until 2024. It is certainly plausible that an American company, accustomed to a pool of cheap labor and under pressure to turn a profit, encouraged Wolt to look to foreign couriers to cut costs.

Despite the high-tech gloss of companies like Wolt and Foodora, the business model they employ is rather old-fashioned. It would be familiar to many Hungarians who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall and waited tables or cleaned hotel rooms in Switzerland, Austria, or Britain for a few years and then returned home. It would also be familiar to European labor economists and employers of the post–Second World War era. Starting in the 1950s and continuing for decades, guest workers from the European periphery—Spain, southern Italy, Yugoslavia, and Turkey—were recruited to work in heavy industry in Germany, France, and the Low Countries. 

This model eventually broke down as older, labor-intensive industries declined and companies pushed for permanent work visas, which relieved them of the obligation of recruiting and training a new crop of workers every few years. But in an age of anti-immigrant populism and declining birth rates, the old guest worker model is once again en vogue. No European country, including pro-natalist Hungary, has figured out how to reliably coax citizens into having more babies. Yet mass immigration is an equally unpalatable option for voters, who have correctly inferred that integrating large numbers of newcomers from distant societies is a difficult proposition. The short leash afforded by guest worker programs keeps couriers like Mohammed safely in the background of the societies they service: present for deliveries and other conveniences, but otherwise confined to the margins of a country that isn’t much interested in cultural diversity.

In decades past, Western European countries were unsentimental about their guest worker programs. When demand for cheap labor slackened in the 1970s, millions of Italians, Spaniards, and Yugoslavs were unceremoniously shipped home. In 1977, a West German Federal Commission declared, “Germany is not an immigrant country. It is a temporary residence country for foreigners, who after a period of time more or less extensive return to their home countries for personal reasons.”As political resistance to mass immigration increases, other European countries may revisit the guest worker system. 

This old-fashioned approach might seem a bad match for companies like Wolt and Foodora, with their smartphone apps and fluency in the gee-whiz language of Silicon Valley. (Wolt’s “About” section, complete with references to Game of Thrones and diversity outreach, makes for incredible reading.) But for all their technological bells and whistles, Wolt and Foodora have merely adapted a model that has existed since 2009, when Uber first introduced the idea of ordering taxis via smartphones. Otherwise, the companies’ services depend on a pool of cheap, easily replenishible labor. At least in Hungary, it’s not clear whether the business model would be sustainable without a constant inflow of foreign couriers. 

What about the other side of the courier economy? The foreign delivery riders I spoke to seemed content to make money in a European country for a few years, even if the work was dull and the living arrangements spartan. There were stories of confrontations over traffic mishaps and bungled deliveries, but no lurid tales of racialized violence or harassment from the locals. Indeed, most of the Hungarians I met took pains to say they felt no prejudice toward foreign workers. Yet it’s unclear whether the broader remittance model is actually a recipe for sustainable economic growth. It’s certainly telling that nearly two generations after Naipaul pointed out Pakistan’s dependence on foreign earnings, the country remains an economic backwater.  

Then there is the actual service provided by the couriers, which is often convenient but fundamentally inessential. Budapest’s delivery app economy is only a few years old. Without Covid, companies like Wolt might never have acquired a foothold in the city. The benefits of app-based delivery services are enjoyed mainly by affluent Hungarians and foreign visitors while the costs—crowded city streets, arguments in traffic, an aura of squalor that seems to metastasize whenever couriers congregate around fast food restaurants—are felt by everyone.  Talking to couriers did give me an appreciation for their stamina. After chasing interviews around town for a few days, I was hungry and in no mood to cook. I opened the Wolt app on my phone and scanned an array of local delivery options that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago, from poke bowls to Neapolitan-style pizza to pad Thai. I made my selection and settled in to wait. About 20 minutes later, a courier rang my buzzer. Sure enough, he wasn’t Hungarian. I thanked him for the food and he drove off into the night.