Radio interview – Orbán: Hungary wants to ‘act’ on illegal migration

Budapest, September 16 (MTI) – Hungary’s view on the migrant crisis is that “we must act, not surrender”, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told public Kossuth Radio in an interview aired on Friday.

Orbán said illegal migrants can indeed be kept out with the use of physical barriers.

Hungary’s interest lies in stemming the migration pressure on Europe at the southernmost point possible, and the country is therefore ready to help Serbia, Bulgaria and Macedonia in this regard, the prime minister said.

Orbán said the mentality that “there is no way they [migrants] can be stopped … we’d better start thinking about how we can take them in” constitutes “nihilism”. The people in Brussels are well-intentioned but naive, Orbán said, adding, however, that in a situation like the migrant crisis, naivety can “come back to haunt” Europe.

If the US is capable of keeping illegal immigrants from crossing its southern border with the use of physical barriers “then I don’t see why we Europeans couldn’t be capable of the same thing,” Orban said.

He said illegal migration is a matter in which it becomes “completely clear” that the solution is not to give more powers to the EU but rather to help member states fulfil the border protection commitments they had made in the Schengen Agreement. “But right now the situation is reversed because Brussels wants to curb the powers of member states in connection with the migrant crisis,” the prime minister said.

Orbán said there is a lot at stake in Hungary’s Oct. 2 migrant quota referendum, arguing that if the EU’s planned migrant redistribution scheme is implemented, the EU will “take money away” from Hungary and spend it on “the migrants arriving here”. He said this would also apply to cities where leftist parties are in control of the municipal government.