Hungary’s future: anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism and anti-Roma?

Commentary on Hungary’s increasing anti-immigrant and anti-multicultural policies and practices:

Hungary has recently passed new legislation tightening asylum rules and is now building a border fence along the Serbian border to keep migrants and refugees out. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, believes Hungary cannot cope with any immigration, as it has no experience of ‘multiculturalism’. But Hungary has always been multicultural, with Roma and other minorities making up 10-12% of the country’s citizens.

Viktor Orbán’s campaign against migrants to Hungary was already in full force before he started to build a 4 metre-high fence along the 110-mile border with Serbia. In May this year his government, Fidesz, sent a questionnaire to every household as part of a ‘National Consultation on Immigration’. This included skewed questions clearly linking immigrants to terrorism, such as: “There are some who think that mismanagement of the immigration question by Brussels may have something to do with increased terrorism. Do you agree with this view?” Reportedly costing 1 billion forints (EUR 3.2m), the consultation bizarrely cost far more than any money put aside for managing immigration.

New waves of migration are a contemporary issue for Hungary – Hungary has become a major transit country for migrants. In the last six months alone a reportedly 71,200 migrants entered the country. This article doesn’t question the scale or potential problem this poses for Hungary, what it does question is the speed and force with which Orbán’s governing party Fidesz has taken up an anti-immigration stance, and how this stance is being linked to anti-Roma (or anti-Gypsy) discourse.

This article argues that Orbán’s focus on immigration has emerged and become a diversion from the deep inequalities, extensive oligarchic type of state corruption and daily police and institutional harassment that many Hungarian citizens (whether Roma or not) are currently facing.[1] Racism against Roma – or ‘Romaphobia’ – adds a particular negative political and media sting that further destabilises Hungary’s already intercultural, but frequently divisive, society. Not facing these problems, we argue, will make any new migration flows and the potential for their future integration impossible to deal with.

Hungary’s future: anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism and anti-Roma? | openDemocracy.