Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Tuesday appealed to the European Union for funding for border fences, reviving, like Austria, an idea long considered unacceptable. His comments came ahead of an extraordinary EU summit on February 9-10 to discuss reducing illegal immigration, a condition Vienna is pushing to accept Romania’s possible entry into Schengen.

Austria, for its part, requested such financing from the European Commission for the construction of a fence on the border between Bulgaria and Turkey, News.ro reminds.

The meeting of 27 EU leaders was called after complaints from Austria and the Netherlands about the growing number of illegal immigrants. Frontex, the European bloc’s border agency, reported 330,000 illegal EU border crossings last year, the highest since 2016.

But EU countries are deeply divided over how to share responsibility for refugees arriving on their territory, and for years have focused on strengthening external borders to prevent people from using illegal routes, often at the cost of their lives.

Countries such as Poland, Hungary and Slovenia have erected border fences to keep out refugees and migrants, although the European Commission, which manages the bloc’s joint budget, has so far refused to pay for such barriers, saying they run counter to democratic values. and human rights.

In phone calls ahead of the summit with his Polish, Belgian, Finnish, Maltese and Bulgarian counterparts, Viktor Orbán asked for EU funding for such projects, saying “fences protect all of Europe,” according to Hungarian news agency MTI, quoted by Reuters.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has previously refused to fund “barbed wire or walls”, although the Brussels executive is offering money for physical border infrastructure such as surveillance equipment.

The EU says Syrians, Afghans and Tunisians dominated those arriving in Europe last year, and that only a third of them will be eligible for asylum, with the rest having to be sent back.

“Broken System”

After taking in millions of refugees from Ukraine, the European bloc is now trying to send home more people from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, while a rise in illegal border crossings is reviving tougher immigration policies.

In a joint letter sent ahead of the summit, the leaders of Malta, Denmark, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Austria and Slovakia said “the current EU asylum system is dysfunctional”.

“Illegal migration has again become one of the most urgent problems of the EU,” they said. “Without renewed efforts that bring results, we can only expect illegal migration to Europe to continue and grow in the years to come,” these leaders warn.

But deep divisions among the 27 EU countries over the treatment of migrants and refugees show it will be difficult to agree a new global migration and asylum system for the European bloc before the next European Parliament elections in 2024.

Human rights groups have criticized the EU’s increasingly restrictive approach to migration, saying it is both illegal and inhumane.

Other critics say tough talk on migration serves to score electoral points with right-wing voters and ignores labor shortages in an aging Europe.