Hungarian Foreign Minister Szijjártó: More people in Europe becoming reasonable about illegal migration

While more and more in Europe are discussing illegal migration with the voice of reason, it is clear that the “Brussels elite” continues to support migration and is trying to put pressure on member states, Péter Szijjártó, the foreign minister, said in Copenhagen on Tuesday.

Szijjártó meets with Morten Messerschmidt

Budapest and Copenhagen share a number of positions concerning illegal migration, “the gravest security challenge facing Europe”, Szijjártó said after talks with the leader of the Danish People’s Party and Denmark’s immigration minister.

“There’s been an intense debate about this in the Western world for 9-10 years now,” Szijjártó said. “It’s clear that some elections are even decided by the issue of migration,” he added, noting that immigration had been a key issue in the US presidential election campaign, “and it was won by the candidate who put his country’s security first and spoke clearly about the dangers of illegal immigration”.

Szijjártó said that the deterioration of Europe’s security situation was clearly linked to “the emergence of mass migrant waves”.

Noting Hungary’s opposition to migration, he said there was “no question in Hungary that the security of the Hungarian people is the number one consideration”.

He noted that the Hungarian government has spent more than 2 billion euros on the protection of the country’s southern border over the last nine years, thwarting some 630,000 illegal entry attempts.

Had Hungary not done this and instead “given in to Brussels, there would be hundreds of thousands or millions more illegal migrants in Europe today”, and Hungarians, too, would have to be living together with them, the minister said.

“We Hungarians consider it outrageous that that while we’re protecting the European Union’s external borders, our own security and that of and Europeans, we’re ordered to pay a million euros a day to Brussels as a financial sanction,” he said, referring to a fine the EU court instructed Hungary to pay for refusing to implement several of the bloc’s migration rules.

“Were it up to Brussels and Hungarian opposition politicians supporting Brussels, Hungary would be flooded by illegal migrants,” Szijjártó said, insisting that Brussels wanted to “install a puppet government in Hungary” so that illegal migrants could enter the country.

He praised Denmark’s “rational migration policy”, underlining that the two countries were in agreement on the need to bolster the protection of the EU’s external borders.

Szijjártó urged the launch of major development schemes in migrant-sending African countries with a view to eliminating the root causes of migration.

“Economic, health-care and education development schemes are needed, because Africa’s population is projected to increase by almost a billion in the next 20-25 years,” he said.

He noted that Hungary has spent more than half a billion euros on developments in Africa over the past five years and offers higher-education scholarships to 1,835 African students each year.

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