Budapest, June 12 (MTI) – The government is ready to make a decision regarding steps on migration after hearing proposals from the interior minister next Wednesday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said.
All proposals are on the table, including the option of a complete physical border closure, Orban told public radio on Friday.
A Serbian-Hungarian cabinet meeting is scheduled for early July where all related issues will be discussed, he added.
“It is not right that they send over the refugees; they should be stopped while still on Serbian territory,” he said in an interview.
Reception centres should be set up at European Union cost but outside EU borders and member states should be allowed to decide whether they receive entrants, he insisted. He said Schengen borders were “valuable” which should not be touched “just yet” but outer borders should be reinforced.
He said it was “absurd” that Greece, where a large part of migrants come from, is not classified as a safe country in the EU. The Visegrad grouping of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia agree that the problem should be handled at the Greek borders.
The government’s billboard campaign on immigration targets human traffickers and “economic migrants”, giving them the message that they should stay away from Hungary, Orban told Kossuth radio.
“We are not able to give jobs to immigrants,” he said.
Most people agree that immigration is dangerous, but the political forces that represent “unrealistic” theories are louder, he said, adding that the (anti-billboard) actions of liberal intellectuals are only the voices of a loud, but small minority, who are completely “out of tune with experiences in real life”, he said. They have a right to their opinion, but they must observe the laws, he said.
The messages of the billboards could be called “mild”, he said, adding that they are focused on portraying Hungary as an open and friendly country. “They do not say that you cannot come here, only that all who do must obey the laws,” Orban said.
He said the EC’s drive to push through a proposal on immigration which is against the position of heads of member states is a “disrespectful trick”. The quota system idea has met with so much resentment that other proposals have since been raised, he said.
Hungary’s dispute with Brussels over a European Union contract awarded to Altus, a company owned by Ferenc Gyurcsany, the former prime minister, “is just beginning”, Orban said. “Serious lessons will be learnt” from the case, which he called a “symbolic affair” and a “European affair”.
He said the matter of EU budget money being funneled to Hungary’s political stage was “deeply foreign” to EU principles.
Altus earlier won the contract to assess EU-financed development projects in 2014-2020.
Photo: MTI