Chief Security Advisor György Bakondi said the number of illegal entrants on the border between Hungary and Serbia has grown significantly in recent weeks compared with earlier trends.
Speaking on M1 television, Bakondi said the number of border violations was not excessively high. Still, authorities apprehended 70 people on the southern border this past weekend and more than 3,700 migrants have been caught so far this year. Bakondi said some people smuggling groups had gone back to trying to smuggle migrants across the Hungarian border, explaining that this route was important to them because by coming in this direction, migrants had to cross fewer borders on their way to Western Europe than if they took the Balkan route. He said the government was closely monitoring information concerning illegal migration coming from the Greek-Turkish border and was prepared to keep protecting the border even under more difficult circumstances. Meanwhile, Bakondi said more and more European countries, including Denmark, the United Kingdom and Germany, were planning to tighten their immigration policies. He said many European countries now thought they had too many migrants who were receiving too many benefits. At the same time, he added, the public was becoming “politically impatient seeing the many crimes and terrorist attacks” committed by migrants over the last ten years, as reflected in this year’s European parliamentary elections.