Orban: EU ‘Wrecking Itself’ by Punishing Members that Stop Illegal Migrants, Funding Soros Orgs
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has complained that the European Union is seeking to punish member-states which protect their borders, while funding pro-migration organisations linked to George Soros.
In an interview with Kossuth Radio the national conservative leader warned that, with the Belarus-engineered pressure on Poland’s border having added fuel to the fire of the European Union’s long-simmering migrant crisis, the bloc was “under attack from three directions at once”.
“[W]aves of migrants are reaching Europe through Italy, from the sea, and they sometimes even reach as far as Spain. We see the images from the Polish-Belarusian border, so they’ve also started coming from the East. And our headache, our really big problem, is that migrants are also arriving on the Balkan route via Serbia, Turkey, and Greece. The pressure is increasing from all three directions at once,” the Hungarian premier explained.
Prime Minister Orbán added that, while the European Union is “not giving money for physical border security, they are giving money for everything that assists immigration,” further alleging that Brussels was “giving money to George Soros’s organisations…. [funding] all the ‘civil society organisations’ – or whatever they’re called – that support immigration. And those who are engaged in defence don’t get any.”
“Brussels must understand that it’s wrecking itself,” he warned.
Orbán said that, for its part, Hungary had “stopped more than 100,000 migrants” at its well-defended border barriers in 2021 — “three times the number for last year” — but that the European Union establishment in Brussels was far from supportive of its efforts.
He highlighted the fact that the migrants being stopped are “people committing crimes, crossing the border illegally” and that Hungary would be within its rights to imprison them — “But where would we put 100,000 prisoners?”
Noting as an aside that the EU was trying to remove this option of prosecuting illegal border crossers as a last resort, Orbán went on to explain that it is currently Hungary’s policy to swiftly expel such people, but “The EU doesn’t accept this at all: it wants these 100,000 people to be here in Hungary.”
European Union officials — or “eurocrats” — have taken the stance that “the rules in Hungary today are not right… They say that we should accept these people here, we should ask them for their documents, we should accept some kind of paperwork from these people – or at least their verbal statements; according to them, we should have started 100,000 procedures to check whether we want them here,” he said.
This has been the policy of the Boris Johnson-led British government when receiving illegal boat migrants crossing the English Channel from France and Belgium — safe, first-world EU member-states — with no migrants turned back and all of them received and hosted at the British taxpayers’ expense while their dubious asylum claims are processed, with the result that almost none are deported, despite very few being legitimate refugees.
Hungary, meanwhile, expects would-be asylum seekers to lodge their application at Hungarian embassies in countries outside its borders — principally its southern neighbours of Serbia and Macedonia.
“[T]he the only word for what Brussels is doing [in opposing this system] is stupidity,” Orbán declared, warning that the bloc’s migration crisis “will grow, because 30,000–35,000 people are leaving Afghanistan every day.”
He also expressed concern about Germany’s incoming left-liberal coalition government, which in his view is even more keen on mass migration than the notionally centre-right Angela Merkel.
“[T]he German government’s programme has just been published, in which Germany is described as an immigrant country,” he claimed, suggesting that there are now “two completely different concepts of the nation” among the European Union’s members; namely “countries that are openly acknowledging that they want to be immigrant countries [and] countries – we Hungarians, for example – which are openly acknowledging that they don’t want to be immigrant countries.”
“These two positions cannot be reconciled, because you’re either an immigrant country or you aren’t. And we shall not yield. And if I know them, especially the Germans, they aren’t the kind to do so either,” he concluded pointedly.
