“The current draft of the UN Compact for migration represents a greater danger than ever before for Hungary, because if it is adopted in its present form then illegal immigrants would be eligible to receive the same services as Hungarian citizens”, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó declared in a statement to Hungarian news agency MTI on Wednesday.

The Minister is taking part in the next round of intergovernmental negotiations on the UN global migration package in New York.

As he explained, Hungary will never accept this package, but if it does not struggle against it loudly it will be adopted by the UN, and then illegal immigrants in Hungary would have to be afforded the same exact services as Hungarian citizens “who have been paying their taxes properly for decades” in Hungary. This is unacceptable, he added.

The United Nations is holding the third round of intergovernmental negotiations on the issue, and the UN’s bureaucrats and pro-immigration member states are continuing to maintain pressure on the process of drawing up the text of the document and want to include “totally nonsensical stipulations” in the Compact, the Foreign Minister explained.  “The current draft is worse than any of the previous ones and represents a greater danger than ever before to the security of the Hungarian people”, he said, adding: “For this reason this battle must be fought extremely tenaciously until December to ensure that the Compact is not adopted in this form”.

Mr. Szijjártó said that in his view it is clear from the negotiations conducted so far and from the current draft of the document that the UN continues to want to portray migration as a fundamental human right, whereas it is no such thing. “Meanwhile, they want to place the non-existent rights relating to migration above the truly existing human right according to which everyone has the right to live in safety in their own homeland”, he explained.

“We do not accept the fact that anyone should place the non-existent rights of migrants above the Hungarian people’s right to live in safety”, the Foreign Minister stressed.

“Four totally unacceptable elements have also been included in the proposal, which Hungary will be individually proposing should be removed. These elements include the fact that migrants must receive all possible services during their travels in both transit and target countries irrespective of their legal status”, he explained, adding that this is yet another measure that encourages migration, and which is also “extremely unfair”.

“The fact that according to the proposal countries cannot differentiate between their tax-paying citizens and migrants with relation to the state services provided to them is also unacceptable”, the Minister continued. “This would mean that a Hungarian citizen who has been working and paying taxes in Hungary for decades and an illegal immigrant who has arrived in the country after illegally crossing the border would be eligible to receive the exact same services from the state”, he said. “Hungary will never implement a provision of this kind”, he declared.

A further arguable element is the fact that the Compact “place in brackets to an absolute extent” people’s right to security, because it wants to ban countries from passing on the personal details of migrants, which service providers collect in the interests of providing them with services, to immigration authorities involved in extraditing them, meaning that even if we know that they are in the country illegally, we would not be able to expel them, the Minister explained.

According to Mr. Szijjártó, the proposal relating to the launching of training programmes for migrants even before they set out for another country is also astounding.

(Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MTI)