The Hungarian government says it apprehended some 269,254 “illegal entrants” at its southern border in 2022; a huge jump from the already high figure of 122,239 in 2021.
György Bakondi, chief security advisor to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s pro-borders government, warned “the number of illegal entrants is rising” and that “Hungary is still the main route for undocumented migrants coming from the Balkans with the aid of people smugglers” in an official news bulletin, with the border seeing an average of 738 migrants stopped per day.
The migrants, reported to hail chiefly from Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Morocco, and India, are said to have actually attacked Hungarian personnel on 265 occasions in 2022, leaving 12 police officers and 29 military servicemen with injuries.
Fully 1,924 people-smugglers from an astonishing 73 different countries were detained over the course of the year — “up from 1,277 in 2021” — with the annual border protection bill hitting around 650 billion Hungarian forints, equivalent to roughly 1.63 billion euros.
The Hungarians’ robust approach to the onslaught on its southern border stands in marked contrast to the approach of the Joe Biden administration in the United States, or indeed successive Conservative (Tory) Party-led administrations in the United Kingdom — which might be expected to have a relatively easy time defending their frontiers, given their country’s island status.
The British authorities have in fact not just failed to stop migrants paying organised criminals to bring them across the English Channel in often dangerously unseaworthy small boats, they have actively assisted in bringing them ashore by sending out Border Force and other vessels to pick them up, sometimes even in foreign territorial waters, and taking them not back to the safe European Union countries they set sail from but the rest of the way to Britain.
Tens of thousands of these boat migrants, along with other asylum seekers and refugees, are now being hosted in hundreds of hotels across the country — while British military servicemen and their families, for example, often have to make do with freezing, mould-infested accommodation — at a cost of approaching £7 million a day and rising by October of last year.
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