Hail Hungary!
June 22, 2018
FROM NPR:
Hungary’s parliament passed a series of laws on Wednesday criminalizing the act of aiding undocumented immigrants seeking asylum in the country, despite strong objections from leading European rights bodies. [Notice that this bill does not punish immigrants themselves; it punishes those who encourage migrants to leave their home countries.]
The suite of bills, called “Stop Soros,” allow the government to imprison individuals and nongovernmental organizations for up to a year if they’re deemed to be facilitating what it says is illegal immigration by people not entitled to protections, the BBC reported. A separate amendment to the constitution declared that an “alien population” can not be settled in Hungary.
The latter is in direct defiance of the EU’s migrant relocation plan that would spread more than 150,000 Syrian, Iraqi and Eritrean asylum seekers among member countries — a quota policy Hungary has been fighting since it was first rolled out.
“The Hungarian people rightfully expects the government to use all means necessary to combat illegal immigration and the activities that aid it,” Interior Minister Sandor Pinter wrote according to The Guardian.
Pinter added: “The Stop Soros package of bills serves that goal, making the organization of illegal immigration a criminal offence. We want to use the bills to stop Hungary from becoming a country of immigrants.”
