Hungary’s Orban May Have Last Laugh on Immigration as Brussels, in Crisis Mode, Bows to Meloni and Swings to the Right

The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, does not need to deliver a knockout punch to his detractors on immigration this week, because the rapid pace of events has done it for him. Last week at Strasbourg he said that “everyone said I am an idiot or evil” for declaring in 2015 that the migrant crisis is getting worse, “but at the end of the day everyone is going to agree with me.”Was he right? Certainly, the Brussels mandarins from the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on down are, while clutching their fragile credibility, making an abrupt turn to the right in an attempt to tackle a migrant emergency. This European crisis differs in scope and scale from the one on America’s porous southern border.That is due in large part to geographical differences and the role of the Mediterranean Sea. Consider that on Sunday, a small boat packed with 81 refugees that had set off from Turkey foundered off the Greek coast. Rescued by a cargo ship, the asylum seekers are now in a taxpayer-funded state of limbo somewhere in Greece because they didn’t make it to their first choice destination: Italy.Had they alighted there today, however, the latest boatload of undocumented migrants might have ended up in Albania, where the conservative government of Prime Minister Meloni of Italy has through a robust bilateral agreement set up a number of asylum processing centers to help manage the overflow. Also, thousands of refugees have been streaming into Britain on small boats, leading Sir Keir Starmer to lean on Signora Meloni’s bold approach to get to grips with a crisis that, as Mr. Orban presciently put it, refuses to go away.“We see a war in Europe. There are serious conflicts in the East, in Africa, and we’re feeling the consequences,” the Eurosceptic also said last week, adding that “every international conflict risks escalation, and the security risks to the Schengen area are very serious.”In June the European Union’s Court of Justice ordered Hungary to pay more than $200 million for not implementing EU-mandated changes to its policies regarding migrants and asylum seekers at its border — but Hungary is no longer the only European country forging its own path on migration. Away from American election fever and Middle East chaos a huge shift is underway in Europe and it appears to encompass the entire political spectrum. The calls to opt out of migration policies, led by far-right figures like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Mr. Orbán in Hungary, are expanding to more centrist leaders such as Chancellor Scholz and, though less perceptibly for now, President Macron. This is astonishing for a continent that until recently made a cottage industry of virtue signaling on immigration rather than formulating common — and common sense — policies. Questions may linger over what, aside from momentum, drove the new shift in the EU’s migration narrative.Yet the erstwhile emphasis on “solidarity” and collective responsibility has now effectively been replaced by member states advocating for tougher measures on their own.The debate is now about how to push back against the human smugglers, reinstate border controls that EU bureaucrats erroneously thought they could do without, and no less consequentially, making the deportation option politically palatable again.All that is poised to upend key sections of the EU’s new pact on migration and asylum, which despite criticisms was approved in April. The number of asylum applications reached 1,140,000 across the European Union last year alone, so this year the pressure is on.In a seven-page letter sent to EU member states this week the European Commission outlined plans for fresh strategies to combat illegal migration and these explicitly mention the “development of return hubs outside the EU.”This is exactly what Italy and Albania are already doing, and why the letter references the “Italy-Albania protocol,” as the EU “will also be able to draw lessons from this experience in practice.” That means a further normalization of the offshore detention model, which has huge implications for Europe in the near term, Great Britain in the intermediate term, and potentially even America. Under Prime Minister Sunak, the British government promoted a plan by which asylum seekers entering Britain illegally could be sent to Rwanda. When Tory government was replaced by a Labor one in July that plan fell apart, but it could see the light of day again in a modified version.Right now, the kinetic action is on the Continent, and that means beyond Budapest. Poland’s conservative PiS party has just proposed a nationwide referendum on the EU migration pact. A former Polish defense minister, Mariusz Błaszcz, suggested that the country’s current prime minister, Donald Tusk, should follow the lead of Hungary and the Netherlands and request a temporary exemption from the migration pact.However, Mr. Błaszcz stated, “Since he won’t do it, nor will he support our referendum motion, it means that he is cheating again and trying to find some substitute theory to solve the problem of people from the Middle East and North Africa storming Europe.”Signora Meloni, for her part, isn’t waiting for Brussels. Italy is already preparing its own set of rules on border enforcement and asylum procedures, which are likely to be approved in the Italian parliament and take effect by the end of next year.As Brussels is left in the dust politically, all roads may yet lead to Rome. Signora Meloni is the one who spearheaded the new initiatives on return hubs that Ms. von der Leyen herself is now hailing as the kind of “out of the box thinking” that Europe needs.

Hungary’s Orban May Have Last Laugh on Immigration as Brussels, in Crisis Mode, Bows to Meloni and Swings to the Right

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