COPY LINK

IMMIGRATION

Orban calls refugees ‘poison’ after Kern meeting

Hungary's right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Tuesday described the arrival of asylum seekers in Europe as "a poison", saying his country did not want or need "a single migrant".

Published: 26 July 2016 19:53 CEST

Orban calls refugees 'poison' after Kern meeting

Photo: European People's Party/Wikimedia

“Hungary does not need a single migrant for the economy to work, or the population to sustain itself, or for the country to have a future,” he told a joint press conference in Budapest with Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern.

“This is why there is no need for a common European migration policy: whoever needs migrants can take them, but don't force them on us, we don't need them,” Orban said.

The populist strongman added that “every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk”.

“For us migration is not a solution but a problem… not medicine but a poison, we don't need it and won't swallow it,” he said.

Orban is a fierce opponent of the European Union's troubled plan to share migrants across the 28-nation bloc under a mandatory quota system.

Hungary has filed a legal challenge against the proposal and will hold a referendum on its participation in the scheme on October 2.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees trekked through Hungary and Austria in 2015 as they sought to reach wealthy European nations.

But the flow slowed to a trickle after Orban's government erected razor wire and fences along the southern borders last autumn and brought in tough anti-migrant laws.

However, numbers have been rising again in recent months, reaching almost 18,000 so far this year.

In response Budapest introduced further security measures this month, including the controversial forced return to no-man's land between Hungary and Serbia of any migrant found within eight kilometres (five miles) of the southern border.

'We have to assist'

In early July, Austria promised to send 20 police officers to the Serbian frontier, where around 20 asylum seekers a day are allowed to cross into a border “transit zone” and apply for asylum.

The offer marked a turnaround for Vienna, previously a vocal critic of Hungary's hardline treatment of migrants.

Kern, on his first visit to Hungary since becoming chancellor in May, said migration to Austria and Germany had declined thanks to Hungary's tough measures.

“If we are beneficiaries from this process, then we have to assist it,” he said.

But Kern also stressed that nongovernmental aid agencies should be allowed to help people stranded on the Serbian side of the border.

Around 1,400 people are waiting in squalid makeshift camps at the border, according to the UNHCR.

Kern and Orban also discussed the return of migrants from Austria to Hungary, which has been a recent source of tension between the two countries.

After their meeting, Orban said his government was willing to take back from Austria asylum seekers registered as having entered the EU in Hungary.

This affects primarily Balkan migrants, which only make up a small number of those Vienna wants to send back.

Member comments

Become a Member to leave a comment.

With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.