Hungary to stop refugees with new fences

One suggestion is for Greece, which has comprehensively failed to secure its borders, to hand over their border-control responsibilities to other more capable nations – a role for which Hungary has volunteered itself, reports N-TV.de. “When a government loses control of its territory, as we saw in the Ukraine, then [the rule of law fluctuates]”.

The Hungarian government yesterday placed full-paged advertisements in An Nahar, a Lebanese newspaper, warning of “the strongest possible action” against illegal border crossings.

The CSU’s public appearance with Orban showed that the CSU does not consider the Hungarian prime minister to be the enfant bad of European refugee policy. This includes taxi drivers taking migrants to the Austrian border for extortionate sums, and people-smugglers hiding migrants in trucks and driving them north. On the street, private money-changers are giving some refugees 200 forints for a euro, even though the bank rate is over 300 forints.

Orban will on Tuesday seek to block a system of quotas drawn up by Jean-Claude Juncker to redistribute 120,000 migrants from Italy and Greece around the EU.

Hungary completed that border fence and deployed regular patrols, leading to a drastic drop of migrants crossing that stretch of the border and entering Croatia instead. It has registered more than 220,000 asylumseekers this year, a wave Budapest has said it would do everything to deflect.

The migrants and refugees are using Eastern European countries, such as Hungary, Serbia and Croatia, as transit routes to Germany, with local authorities having serious problems processing the deluge of people. Under the fourth proposal, every member state should increase contribution to the European Union by 1% and cut spending by 1%, resulting in 3 billion euros to be spent on refugees. Austrian police said 24,000 migrants arrived over the weekend. A lot of them are not Christians, but Muslims.

Croatian Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic told RTL television late on Monday: “I think it is perfectly clear that what we are seeing is organised transport of migrants directly to Croatia (from Serbia)”. Everything will be OK.

Police fired tear gas after hundreds of migrants broke through a razor wire fence last week.

Though Hungary has so far been alone in adopting such tough measures, the Hungarian sentiment is shared by other central European states.

In Romania’s Adevarul, Viorica Marin sees a “Europe divided West against East over refugee quotas“, and the tabloid Click asks how many refugees the country can be expected to take.

“We need to strike the right balance between helping those in need and guaranteeing the security of our citizens”, wrote Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna in an op-ed published by Politico Europe.