Hungary has vowed to continue resisting EU attempts to impose compulsory migrant quotas, and will even send men and material to neighbouring Macedonia to help it protect its borders.
Lajos Kósa, a member of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s conservative government, warned that the network of so-called “civil society” organisations linked to George Soros — the billionaire financier and open borders activist the Hungarians believe is behind the quota scheme — are ramping up their efforts to push for its implementation.
Kósa cited Soros’s transfer of 130 million Hungarian forints to the Association of Alternative Communities (AKE), one of several NGOs he described as “sham charity civil organizations” whose primary purpose is really “political activities”.
Not content to remain on the defensive, however, Hungary has also announced it will send men and materials to Macedonia, which lies nearby but outside the European Union and not directly on its borders, to help it strengthen and patrol its border with Greece, until at least October 2018.
Swamped by hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants at the height of the migrant crisis itself, Hungary was one of the first countries in Europe to recognise that a robust, no-nonsense approach was needed, rapidly rolling out a protective fence along its frontiers which was later reinforced and upgraded with monitoring equipment, and manned by a significantly expanded border force.
Budapest’s strong borders approach achieved results — illegal immigration was cut by over 99 per cent — but was unpopular in Brussels, where the European Commissioner for Migration has argued that a massive inflow of non-Europeans is “is deeply intertwined with our policies [and] an economic and social imperative for an ageing continent”.
Indeed, the EU establishment is seeking to “manage” the migrant crisis by redistributing migrants throughout its member-states through a compulsory quota system, and also establishing “legal routes” to Europe from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
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