GREATEST HITS: ‘They don’t even try’: Hungary’s border ‘success’

FPI / January 5, 2019

Countdown: Top stories of 2019

Skeptics who believe a border wall will not stop illegals from entering the United States may want to look at what's happening in Hungary.

On the day its border fence was completed, the influx of illegals entering Hungary went down from 6,353 one day to 870 the next. For the remainder of that month, illegal border crossings were steadily below 40 per day, officials said.

“They don’t even try,” a local border guard told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “We haven’t had a Syrian in six months.”

Prime Minister Viktor Orban's pledge to stop illegals from flowing into the country appears to be a spectacular success.

Hungary’s 96-mile long, 14-foot tall double-line fence includes several layers of razor-wire capable of delivering electric shocks. The barrier features cameras, heat sensors and loudspeakers ready to tell migrants they’re about to break Hungarian law if they as much as touch the fence, the Daily Caller report said.

Nearly every police officer in Hungary is part of a rotation to monitor the border fence at all times. Temporary military bases house the police while they do their rotation.

Additionally, Hungary will train and pay more than 1,000 volunteers to deploy as “border hunters”.

Illegals who are caught are arrested and dropped off on the Serbian side of the fence. They don’t get a chance to apply for asylum unless they do so at a “transit zone” where they are held in housing containers while their cases get processed, the Daily Caller report said.

In September 2015, thousands of migrants streamed across the border every day as they made their way north to Austria, Germany and Scandinavia.

“It was an invasion,” Laszlo Toroczkai, the mayor of Asotthalom, told the Daily Caller. “Illegal immigration is a crime in a normal country. It’s not a normal thing to break into a country.”

“By the mid-year it was well beyond 100,000 people who came across,” said Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesman for the Hungarian government. “You should at least have the ability to handle what’s going on.”

Kovacs added: “You might not like it, it’s not a nice thing, but … the only way to stop illegal border crossings is [to] first build a fence, man it, equip it, and also, in parallel, build up your capabilities in terms of legal confines, legal circumstances to be able to handle what is coming.”

Free Press International