BUDAPEST, Hungary — The leaders of Hungary, Serbia and Slovakia on Tuesday proposed setting up facilities outside European Union territory to receive asylum seekers. He said the solution would help stop illegal immigration, which the EU believes poses an existential threat. .
After a meeting in Komarno, Slovakia, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Slovakian Prime Minister Roberto Fico agreed to support the EU, including more effective deportation measures and increased funding for member states. He outlined the stricter immigration policies he would like to see adopted. Countries on the outer borders of the bloc.
The long-awaited migration deal adopted by the EU in May “is not a solution, it’s the problem itself,” said Orbán, who has long been the 27-nation bloc’s most vocal opponent of migration.
He proposed setting up EU-funded and run “hotspots” in North Africa and elsewhere to hold asylum seekers until their applications for international protection are approved.
“People who want to go to Europe gather there and from there they submit their applications and we evaluate them. Anyone we allow can come, but those we don’t allow remain. “Yes,” Prime Minister Orbán said. “Please wait outside. All other solutions are ineffective.”
All three leaders have been vocal opponents of immigration, but Mr. Orbán has made immigration a central pillar of his right-wing populist rule for nearly a decade. In 2022, he sparked outrage when he told an audience of party members that he did not want Hungary to become “mixed”. He also argues that “Europe doesn’t have enough Christian, white, traditional Europeans.”
On Tuesday, Mr Orbán’s ally Fico proposed that the EU erect physical barriers on its external borders. This was done unilaterally by Hungary in 2015 after hundreds of thousands of people, most fleeing war and instability in Syria and Iraq, entered the EU. A few months.
Fico also criticized the EU’s recent immigration reforms, saying the bloc needed to pass “a new migration deal that takes into account things that the law does not yet allow”, such as deportations.
In a joint statement adopted during the meeting, the three leaders said that illegal migration is a “serious problem driven by geopolitical instability, increasing conflict in Europe’s neighbourhood, and social inequality.” agreed.
However, the number of irregular border crossings into the region fell by 42% in the first nine months of 2024, and by 79% along the Western Balkans route, which includes Serbia and Hungary, according to Frontex, the EU’s border authority. did.