During the pandemic, it was ascertained that if there is political will, borders can be sealed, the external borders of the European Union can be protected and migration can be halted as far away from the EU’s borders as possible, Chief Security Advisor to the Prime Minister György Bakondi stressed in an interview given to the newspaper Magyar Hírlap.

In the interview published in the Friday edition of the newspaper, Mr Bakondi drew attention to the fact that, compared with the period of the coronavirus epidemic, there is now a significant increase in the number of migrants. During the pandemic, the nation states of the Balkans region all the way to the Greek-Turkish border introduced extremely strict border control measures. They deployed both police and military units; in Serbia, for instance, the some nine thousand illegal immigrants staying in the country’s border regions were taken to camps guarded by the Serbian army, and as a result, the number of illegal border crossing attempts decreased. It has been ascertained that if there is political will, the European Union’s external borders can be protected and migration can be halted as far away from the EU’s borders as possible, he stressed.

If, however, there is no political will or it is aimed at something else, we will have to expect ongoing illegal immigration in the long run. Even those earlier concepts need to be revised which were based on the idea that illegal immigrants should be brought into the territory of the EU in order to address the shortage of workforce capacity as during the pandemic hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs and livelihoods, and so we must primarily provide for them, Mr Bakondi said.

These people do not want to be given refugee status in Hungary; their goal is to reach one of the European Union’s richest countries through our country. They want to go to countries where other immigrants are already present in large numbers and where their relatives are. This is not about a genuine wave of political asylum applicants as not a single immigrant is persecuted in Greece or Serbia. In the case of the transit zones, we saw that it was mostly families and elderly people who tried to seek protected status on the grounds of family reunification; however, fit young men who are making daily attempts to cross the border on the Serbian-Hungarian and Romanian-Hungarian border sections do not pay any attention to such details, they simply just want to overcome the obstacle caused by the Hungarian border policing system and seek to reach Austria or Germany as quickly as possible with the aid of people smugglers, the chief security advisor said.

(Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MTI)