One million illegal migrants in eight years

In eight years, Hungarian authorities have apprehended nearly one million illegal migrants. In addition to physical barriers and legal measures, the country has been protecting the Serbia-Hungary border with live force since 2015. The European Union has continued to punish Hungary since then for its border protection system, which proved to be effective.

Fotó: Arpad Kurucz

During the rioting on 16 September 2015, migrants and Hungarian police guarding the border crossing at the old road crossing point along main road 5 violently clashed, leaving hundreds of people injured. On 1 July 2016, the district court in Szeged, southern Hungary, sentenced ten migrants (mostly claiming to be Syrian nationals) involved in the riots to prison and ordered their expulsion from Hungary. Three days after the riot, police in Gyor, western Hungary, arrested Syrian Ahmed Hamed, one of the presumed instigators of the violence, who was sentenced to five years on charges of committing terrorist acts.

Protecting the border

In response to the sudden influx of illegal migrants into Hungary and Europe in 2015, the Hungarian government took a series of measures. Criminologist Andras Laszlo Szabo highlighted the sixth amendment to Hungary's fundamental law as the most important, since it affected the application of the law and the administration of justice. Based on the amendment to the fundamental law, the criminal code was amended at the initiative of the Orban cabinet. The amendment to the criminal code made it possible to speed up criminal proceedings, for example in cases of organised human trafficking or illegal border crossing. At the same time, with the tasks of the Immigration and Citizenship Office mounting, the infrastructure was created to have experts dispatched to the border. The processing of cases was also sped up by formally relying on interpreters and helpers. The increase in migratory pressure also had a major impact on the police force, as officers from other areas had to be transferred to combat illegal immigrants and people smugglers.

However, these highly-trained police officers were not trained for border protection. Due to the transfer of officers, staffing problems emerged at police stations at the county level and at the riot police at the national level. At the same time, people's subjective perception of security decreased and serious security risks arose, mainly due to the arrival of terrorists mingled with the illegal migrants.

In addition to creating the legal and organisational environment, physical protection was also established from August 2015, with the construction of a physical border barrier (officially: a temporary fence for border protection purposes) on the Serbia-Hungary border and partly on the Croatia-Hungary green border. Infrastructure was built and sufficient human resource was provided for its operation.
Statistical data confirmed the effectiveness of the measures. While 428 261 illegal migrants were apprehended in the period between January and November in 2015, only 34 547 attempts were made in the same period in 2016, without any success, according to information from the National Police Headquarters (ORFK). 

The police started to develop its border police branch, and border hunter units were set up in 2022. Thus, at the end of last year, the military units involved in rotation in border surveillance could be withdrawn. By the spring of this year, the reinforcement of the physical border fence and its extension on Mohacsi Island came to a completion.

The EU penalises

While Hungary has thus protected the border of the Schengen area, and indirectly the European Union, Brussels has been putting pressure on the Hungarian government for the past eight years over its migration measures. Hungary has not been paid a fraction of the hundreds of billions of forints the country has spent on border protection, even though the Serbia-Hungary border is the EU's external border. This, however, did not matter to the bureaucrats in Brussels, who instead pressed for the acceptance of and support for migration.

Time and again, mandatory quotas (the distribution of a certain number of immigrants) have been put on the table. The idea has come up again recently, and two months ago the proposal was   – in a tricky way  –  adopted by the Council of Interior Ministers. Only Poland and Hungary voted against it. If the plan is successfully implemented in the EU, Hungary would have to create a migrant ghetto with a capacity of accommodating at least thirty thousand people.

The Hungarian government is opposed in principle to taking the power of migration policy out of its hands, Bence Retvari, political state secretary at the interior ministry, said. Reiterating the government's position, Gyorgy Bakondi, chief advisor on internal security, stated that anyone who wants to apply for refugee status must submit their application outside the EU's borders. The authorities will assess the applications and those who are eligible will be admitted. Those who are not eligible or do not undergo this procedure will not be allowed to enter the country. It is a functioning system, with all the elements in place, capable of handling large masses of people: police and border hunter forces, a system of physical barriers with multiple reinforcements and a legal border barrier. The removal of any one of the elements would lead to the collapse of the whole system, resulting in a serious deterioration of internal security, the PM's chief advisor said.

Cover photo: Illustration (Photo: Arpad Kurucz)