If We MUST Take Refugees, Why Not Insist On Cultural Affinity?
... So there I was on Thursday night to hear a Hungarian scholar, Kristóf György Veres, give us his country's perspective on immigration into the West. As a Hungarophile from way back, I was particularly interested in what Dr. Veres had to say.
He did not disappoint. Speaking in excellent English, he took us through some basic issues with the official, UN-sanctioned definitions of terms like "refugee" and "asylum seeker." Then he described the events of the mid-2010s, when people escaping the Syrian civil war, mixed in with opportunists from places further east and south, flooded up through the Balkans. At its south, Hungary has nearly four hundred miles of border with Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia, so the flood hit Hungary with full force.
Hungary responded appropriately; appropriately, I mean, to the ideals of national sovereignty we cherish here at VDARE.com [Ukrainian Refugees and Europe: A Marathon, Not a Sprint, by Kristof Gyorgy Veres and Viktor Marsai, CIS.org, April 2, 2022]. They built a good stout double barrier fence along their southern border and defended it very vigorously against would-be invaders—water cannon, tear gas, nightsticks and hand-to-hand engagement when unavoidable....
That solved the problem. It also offered a splendid example of how to solve this kind of problem, for any other country willing to learn—a category that apparently excludes the U.S.A....
... I think the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, that is the United Nations refugee agency, needs to get to work putting Affinity Clauses into its rules. It should be the case, wherever possible—and it's hard to think of situations where it wouldn't be possible—for refugees and asylum seekers to be taken in by nations with which they share some cultural affinity.
Wouldn't that be better for the refugees, sparing them the problems of assimilation into alien environments? Wouldn't it also be better for the host countries, sparing them the trouble, the frictions and the expense, of settling thousands of really, seriously foreign people in their towns and cities?...
Related
Based Hungarians, by Kelli Buzzard, American Mind, 2012may13. Why East-Central Europe has proven resistant to woke doctrine:
... “Central European conservatism after the fall of communism,” wrote Gergely Szilvay recently, “has been—and still is today—anti-communist and patriotic, focusing on national traditions and Christianity. It stands for national independence. For us, freedom means national freedom.”...
Over the last few months, I have informally surveyed dozens of university and graduate students, mostly here in Budapest. To a person, no one understands the logic, let alone the appeal, of the woke movement in America and Great Britain.
Poignantly, one student asked: “Why do so many Americans seem to hate their country? We love America. America has always been our example of freedom.”
A political science student I talked to at a regional campus said, “Even if wokeness made sense to us–which it doesn’t– Hungarians do not have the luxury of being woke. If we stop working together to make Hungary better, we will cease to exist. The Eurocrats will see to that.”...