Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has railed against the political establishment’s migrant policy, calling for the deportation of over a million migrants from the European Union (EU).
Regularly at odds with EU leaders in Western Europe, the Hungarian Prime Minister has said that the political bloc needs to consider deporting over a million migrants who flooded into Europe over the last year, reports Spiegel Online.
“All who have come illegally should be picked up and taken away,” Mr. Orbán told Hungarian media. After securing the borders of his own country, Mr. Orbán is taking his secure border ideology to the rest of the EU, targeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migrant policy.
Mr. Orbán said that he didn’t want to see migrant camps set up within the borders of the EU but rather the bloc should create migrant camps on islands or on the North African coast. He proposed that the camps should be financed by EU member states, where all migrant claims could be rigorously scrutinised before those designated as ‘refugees’ are allowed into the bloc.
The lack of background checks has led to radical Islamic extremists, including members of Islamic State, being admitted into the EU. So-called ‘refugees’ have gone on to commit acts of terror in Paris, Brussels, and several cities in Germany. Law enforcement officials have been alarmed by the scale of the network of Islamic State-linked fighters who were able to walk into Europe thanks to the migrant crisis.
Processing migrants offshore is a system that Australia has practised for years and has been proposed by Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz for incoming migrants. Mr. Orbán’s idea to remove existing migrants from Germany and elsewhere and place them overseas is a more radical version of the plan.
These comments come less than two weeks before the Hungarian people vote in a referendum on whether or not to accept any migrants into Hungary as part of the EU’s proposed migrant redistribution policy. Mr. Orbán hopes that the people will vote to not allow migrants to be sent from Western Europe to Hungary, and polls show that the Hungarian people strongly support his tough stance.
Earlier this week Mr. Orbán’s spokesman Zoltan Kovacs spoke in Brussels and attacked the so-called “migrant helpers” who drive many migrants out of Hungary and across the borders to Austria and Germany, calling them organised criminals. Mr. Kovacs also noted that if the government won the referendum, the EU could expect even tougher migrant laws to be passed in the Central European nation.
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