MCC Budapest Summit on Migration – 22-24 March 2019
Scott B. Nelson
23 April 2019
Information about the conference and the speakers can be found here: http://budapestsummit.mcc.hu/en
There is … no subject on which so much humbug is talked, written or broadcast as on immigration. This is understandable, because the whole question is fraught with difficulties from which the mind, ever in the search for easy solutions, averts itself. Nasty xenophobia on the one hand confronts lazy liberalism on the other. Difficult questions such as the conflict between the national interest and humanitarian feeling are assiduously avoided because they arouse too much anxiety. It is much easier and more gratifying to sink into a nice warm mental bath of self-righteousness.
Theodore Dalrymple, Migration: Multiculturalism and its Metaphors, p. 9
The Budapest Summit on Migration, hosted by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, brought together a wide range of personalities, from politicians to pundits, to discuss the topic of migration, asking whether it is “the biggest challenge of our time?” As Václav Klaus, the former Czech president, remarked during his speech, the question mark at the end of that statement was rather superfluous for the majority of those who attended the conference. If the small number of protesters outside were anything to go by – “suits can’t hide cruelty” read one placard – then any dose of scepticism about mass immigration to Europe was practically an entry pass to the conference; for, despite the conference’s ostensible pretensions to examine the phenomenon of migration tout court, the general thrust was to examine the situation in Europe in particular and the potential threats posed by external immigration to Europe, as opposed to emigration from Europe or from eastern European countries (such as the conference’s host country) to western European countries.
Concerns over mass migration into Europe are shared by many people, and it was one of the great advantages of the conference that it managed to pull together such a varied group of people from all over Europe and beyond to voice their concerns about immigration, in several different languages at that. One of the items demonstrated by this conference is that an openly sceptical discussion about the benefits of mass migration would be welcomed by a proportion of the population much larger than the far-right fringe. It may also have been intended to spark debate in general worldwide, as indicated by Balázs Orbán, one of the present Hungarian government’s ministers. However, from what I can tell, the conference failed to hit most major news networks in Europe and North America, with the exception of Le Figaro (http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/a-budapest-sarkozy-prend-la-defense-d-orban-20190323) and CNN (https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/21/politics/hungary-state-department-migration-summit/index.html), albeit that CNN’s article was less about the conference itself than a criticism of the US government’s decision to send two State Department officials – Andrew Veprek, deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration; and Pete Marocco, deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations – to speak at the conference. Apart from the overblown symbolic significance of this gesture, the CNN commentators needn’t have worried: Veprek’s and Marocco’s speeches were a paragon of diplomatic vacuity, and if anyone managed to stay awake long enough to consider them interesting then they must have benefited more than I had from the coffee on offer. (The meals and refreshments provided by the organizers, by the way, were far superior to what one would expect at such conferences; the white, noisy, uncomfortable plastic chairs rather less so.)
The presentations themselves were held at Várkert Bazár, in a fair sized hall that could probably seat a couple hundred people (attendance varied over the three days), adorned with minimalistic furnishings and swanky club music that made me think that Steve Jobs was going to rise up and present the latest in Apple technology. Instead, András Lánczi, Rector of Budapest’s Corvinus University, opened up the conference with a speech at 14:00, which was then succeeded by fifteen-minute presentations by speaker after speaker and the occasional coffee break until approximately 22:30. The following two days started earlier and ended earlier. While there were apparently some six sections covering different aspects of migration, the impression I had was that the invitees generally spoke about their area of concern in regards to migration. With the sheer number of speakers (some 66, according to the website) I cannot claim to have sat in on every single talk, but the downside of such a large cast of speakers was that many of them ended up saying much the same thing, and there was no time for questions from the audience.
Of the talks I attended, some of the salient themes included the opposition between the nation-state and any form of supranationalism or globalism; the defence of European values and Christianity, particularly regarding the absorption of Islam in Europe; demographic and economic problems associated with migration; and, finally, strategies for dealing with migration.
As was to be expected, politicians such as Viktor Orbán and Václav Klaus made much of the divide between defenders of national sovereignty and the left-leaning elite, (i.e. Brussels functionaries, NGOs, public intellectuals, etc.). Some, such as Paulo Eneas, a writer whose exact affiliation with Jair Bolsonaro’s government in Brazil remains unclear to me, were less censored in their remarks about globalists and their strategies for dismantling the nation-state and Western civilization. Klaus echoed Theresa May’s now famous quote that “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”. On the contrary, we are citizens of nation-states, nation-states whose identities are being dissolved by the EU elite’s desire to import people in the name of diversity, a diversity that strangely culminates in the one-dimensional homo bruxellanus. Alongside this bleak assessment of Brussels’ malevolence, Orbán implicated the mainstream media and international organizations and their message of fear, noting that he could not say so openly in Western Europe the things he was saying in Budapest. It was as if it had been 1956 all over again, except in place of Soviet tanks rolling into the city, free Budapest had now fallen victim to the impenetrably inscrutable prose of Brussels’ admonitions. But at the end of the day, Orbán is convinced that his side has the moral upper hand in this struggle. His reasoning is reminiscent of a passage in Machiavelli’s Discourses:
[I]f we ask what it is the nobility are after and what it is the common people are after, it will be seen that in the former there is a great desire to dominate and in the latter merely the desire not to be dominated. Consequently the latter will be more keen on liberty since their hope of usurping dominion over others will be less than in the case of the upper class. So that if the populace be made the guardians of liberty, it is reasonable to suppose that they will take more care of it, and that, since it is impossible for them to usurp power, they will not permit others to do so.
Machiavelli, Discourses I.5.
In this reading the nation-states are the people – the Hungarian people, in this instance – and the nobility is alternately Brussels, the EU institutions, or the pro-multiculturalism consensus and those associated with it (Merkel, Macron, etc.). Orbán did not explicitly reject multiculturalism itself, but rather argued that each individual nation-state reserve the right to accept or reject it as it will. Whether the nation-states will be able to do so in the long run will depend on a variety of factors, such as the role that borders and the nation-state should play in the EU. Some two decades ago the French president François Mitterrand stated, “le nationalisme, c’est la guerre”. More recently, Jean-Claude Juncker called national borders “the worst invention ever”. As we already know, much of this sentiment is a reaction to the horrors of the 20th century. It is, however, worth recalling the peaceful effects of nationalism and the strong connection between nationalism and democracy. As the American political theorist David Calleo wrote half a century ago:
The modern nation-state, as it has developed in Europe and America, is the most successful attempt so far in history to achieve peaceful democratic consensus within societies that are so vast, diverse, and politically conscious. It is difficult to imagine that modern democracy would have been possible without nationalism…
It is significant that modern democracy has almost never been established outside the context of a national state and that many later democratic theorists were also nationalists. For the participation of the general populace in political power seemed to require that the people be imbued with some sense of civic duty, discipline, and responsibility. The more diverse the elements to be included, the more important it was that they share enough cultural homogeneity to understand each other and a deep common loyalty and identity which made it easier for them to defer to one another in the interest of the whole. Otherwise, representative democracy was thought to be impossible and the only hope for order was seen to be in an authoritarian rule based on governmental force and popular indifference.
David Calleo, Europe’s Future, pp. 25-27.
If nationalism is not to be the glue holding a population together, then on what basis will a population feel that sense of oneness and devotion to the common good that is a precondition for democracy? Or is the erosion of democracy one of the consequences of the breakdown of nationalism? This seemed to be the general direction that the sociologist Frank Furedi was headed in his remarks. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, Furedi noted that democracy can be exercised only within a physical space, i.e. within borders. Furedi’s concern here was that the breakdown of borders is tantamount to the deterritorialization of public life. We cease to be public people and are instead abstract individuals. This is not the place to investigate the philosophy behind this argument, but it is akin to what the French philosopher Pierre Manent has written in his Metamorphoses of the City. In any case, Furedi, in lending a broad definition to the word “border”, seemed as interested in offering his two cents to the ongoing culture wars. He observed, for example, the disappearing boundaries between man and woman in the wake of transgenderism and the fading boundaries between child and adult (adults are increasingly infantilized while children are oversexualized and are thereby turned into adults) – the push toward borderlessness is impeding our very ability to define and categorize human beings.
If Furedi felt that inserting such remarks would be well received by his audience, he was right. Enthusiastic applause followed his talk. This is because the culture wars are relevant to the debate on immigration. The sense among many of the conference participants was that Europe is fighting a two-front war, with the Islamists on one side (Yosef Kuperwasser of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs said we should just call a spade a spade: the problem here is Muslim immigration) and guilt-ridden, pro-multiculturalism Westerners on the other (we are now expected to conform to migrants instead of vice versa, quipped John O’Sullivan, President of the Danube Institute, one of the conference’s sponsors). Merkel’s invitation in 2015 to all and sundry to set up camp in Europe was thus one of the conference’s leitmotifs. One of the problems with Merkel’s decision was that it gave carte blanche to many migrants who were not genuine refugees. The distinction between economic migrants and true refugees has been a sticking point of the whole debate since 2015. It is worth noting that I don’t recall hearing any speaker (save, perhaps, one) argue we should refuse succour to refugees, especially as some of the neediest souls out there are those trapped in their countries of origin and therefore unable to pay the price of making the perilous and illegal journey to Europe’s shores.
As far as the Muslim migrants go, the various speakers were equally aware that they too were not to be welcomed or turned away as if they were a monolithic bloc. The writer Theodore Dalrymple commented that migrants are sometimes hostile to one another, importing their own prejudices and conflicts into the host country. Kuperwasser asked us to distinguish between pragmatic Muslims (pragmatic in view of what?), realist radicals (Muslim Brotherhood, Iranian radicals), and extremists (ISIS, Al Qaeda). He contended that while we are focused excessively on extremists, the real problem lies in the growth of realist radicals, who we assume are our interlocutors, but in reality are a sort of gateway by whom the pragmatic Muslims are drawn ineluctably closer to the extremists through prisons and Islamic schools. However, this great sucking sound of Islam seems to underestimate the attraction of free Western societies. At least two of the conference’s speakers – Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Mosab Hassan Yousef – were converts to the values of Western civilization. And, typical of converts, Yousef was categorical in his understanding of Islam and the West: Islam is a cult, while Western civilization is the fruit of the Ancient Greek virtue of doubt. Deport those whose values do not match those of the West. (Deport those who do not doubt, I guess?) I was lightly amused to see Yousef take to his topic with the passion and seriousness of an extremist. It reminded me of Barry Goldwater’s statement that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…and…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”.
The sense that Western and Christian civilization was in decline was a dominant theme. Miklós Szánthó, Director of the Center for Fundamental Rights, laid out a stark choice: either we opt for migration or we promote family and our Judeo-Christian roots. Hungary’s Christian heritage is essentially in conflict with certain progressive values: abortion, drug liberalization, euthanasia, homosexual marriage, and queer-theory. He concluded his speech by reminding us that it was none other than EU co-founder Robert Schuman who proclaimed that “Europe shall be Christian or cease to exist”. José Herrera, Director of International Relations at the FAES Foundation, was willing to accord a few more values to the West beyond the Christian ones. He argued that in the fight against Islam we need the same strength found in Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and in our victory over fascism and communism. Perhaps in unwitting homage to what is best about the West, Szánthó and Herrera summoned arguments from two different strands of the West’s wide-ranging heritage in order to combat two different threats: the progressives, in the case of Szánthó (but are they not also a legacy of the West?), and Islam, in the case of Herrera.
Not all arguments presented at the conference were of such a philosophical nature. In addition to Kuperwasser, Todd Bensman, National Security Expert at the Center for Immigration Studies, and Mark Krikorian, Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, were two of the few I heard who brought up the security concern commonly associated with Muslim migration. But there were others whose interest in the economic and demographic problems of migration would extend the logic of their critique beyond purely Muslim migration to encapsulate the problems of mass migration in general. One of the most significant casualties of the conference was the oft heard argument that immigration is required in order to rescue the overburdened welfare state of aging societies. This argument not only assumes away any negative externalities owing to differences between the host and immigrant cultures, but it also assumes that migrants end up paying more into the system than they take out; issues regarding the pace of immigration also need examining, given the capacity of states and communities to adjust and accommodate migrants. Herrera, Krikorian, and Judit Varga, a minister in Orbán’s government, observed that there are higher rates of unemployment among migrants than among the native population, as one might expect all over Europe due to problems associated with learning and working in a new language, the education level of the migrants, etc. In the case of Spain, migrants also enjoy double the dropout rate in schools compared to the native population (Herrera). Certain migrant groups, particularly those from Africa, show a higher propensity to crime (Francisco J. Contreras P., Philosophy of Law professor at Universidad de Sevilla). Krikorian argued that mass immigration, regardless of who the migrants are, is incompatible with the goals of a modern society. The immigrants tend to have little education (we’re importing 19th century workers into a 21st century economy, as he said), which decreases their social mobility. This, in addition to technological advancements that allow migrants to stay connected to their home and their past, makes integration all the more difficult.
What does it mean for migrants to integrate? Following Varga – and many others – it would presumably mean that they are not creating parallel societies or communities isolated from the native communities. In 2015, one of the national newspapers in Austria asked representatives from the major political parties what integration meant. They were all in agreement about the usual things: respect for rule of law, freedom of opinion, democracy. However, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) went on to identify three additional criteria for migrants: that they learn German; that they are not exempted from gym or swimming classes; that they cannot request a change in teacher due to the teacher’s sex. It is clear from the criteria which migrant groups are most concerned (apart from the international organization community, some of whose German is about as incomprehensible to most native Austrians as that of the Vorarlbergers), but are the criteria themselves unjust? For Orbán, there was a far simpler indicator of whether integration is successful or not: intermarriage.
The Hungarian government’s stance on the whole issue did get myself and one of the conference’s speakers, Kishore Jayabalan, Director of the Acton Institute in Rome, wondering whether there was an underlying preoccupation with race. As Jayabalan writes in his own commentary on the conference: “Two Nigerian priests and an Iraqi Orthodox Archbishop made pleas for the survival of their local Churches against Islamist threats. I gathered that most of those present would rather help these Christians by increasing foreign aid to Africa and rebuilding churches in the Middle East rather than welcoming them to Europe. An inescapable yet unaddressed question at the Budapest conference: Do the race and ethnicity of immigrants matter more than their beliefs?” (Jayabalan’s full commentary can be found here: https://acton.org/pub/commentary/2019/04/04/inside-eu-debate-islamic-immigration). On the last day of the conference I sat next to a young Nigerian Christian who was studying in Hungary as a part of the Hungary Helps programme, an initiative begun in 2017 to offer aid to persecuted Christians around the world. By 2050, the European Christian population will have decreased by 99 million, according to Orbán. Given the rapidly growing population in Africa (from approximately 1.3 billion now to a predicted 1.7 billion in 2030 and 2.5 billion in 2050, UN DESA figures) pressure to move to Europe will accordingly increase. Now, the decline in the Christian population could easily be offset by welcoming the growing Christian populations from Latin America, south Asia, and Africa, such as the Nigerian who sat next to me. But I get the sense that this would not be an acceptable solution, because there might be more at stake here than shared values, and all of the good Christian behaviour on the part of the Nigerian next to me might never justify more of his compatriots coming to Hungary. I would comment that, by contrast, the Anglo-Saxon speakers seemed far less concerned about the race of migrants than about the sheer numbers.
Numbers can confuse the general migration discussion as well. One of the problems in addressing mass migration is discussing it using examples of individual migration. Klaus made this very point in his speech, where he chastised the elites for talking favourably about mass migration while only giving positive examples of individuals migrating. (And, as Dalrymple pointed out, some groups that were discriminated against, such as the Sikhs, tend not to be mentioned because they are doing better than before in terms of employment and income; discrimination in their case cannot actually be linked to a negative inequality of outcome.) Both sides of the debate are guilty of this though: instances of Islamist terrorism can be used to denounce Muslims as barbarians who should not be allowed to enter Europe, while there will be no shortage of Alan Kurdi photos to convince us that all migrants are innocent and deserving of our self-righteous exhortations on social media, if not of our actual help.
So how should countries deal with the problem of migration? The conference speakers were more or less united in their opposition to the fatalism surrounding much of the migration debate. There are options other than allowing mass migration. The contentious issue appeared for most of the speakers to be how to ensure an acceptable and absorbable level of migration into their respective countries (anyone therefore who feels we should live in a borderless world will have found scant sympathy in this company). Roman Joch, Executive Director of the Občanský Institute in Czech Republic, argues that immigrants should accept the values of the host country, and he recommends a steady and slow level of migration that is acceptable to the citizens. As different citizens of different countries will have different breaking points in their levels of tolerance, this will vary from country to country. In the context of the EU it may also necessitate the choice between a common immigration policy (which would likely be very restrictive given the opposition in many countries against mass migration) or some modification, if not outright dissolution, of Schengen. It will not be enough for Hungary to have a restrictive immigration policy while Germany has a liberal one. If the migrants in Germany are working there and become German citizens, will they have the right to live and work in Hungary if they should so wish?
David Inserra, of the Heritage Foundation, contributed to the debate with the four do’s and don’ts of migration: don’t allow mass immigration; don’t encourage illegal immigration; do have good laws and enforcement when it comes to immigration; with caveats, do allow refugees and asylum seekers. A couple of former Australian government officials (Alexander Downer and Mark Higgie) shared the Australian experience of migrant management and their efforts to break the migrant smuggling network (an application of Inserra’s rule: “don’t encourage illegal immigration”). The mercurial Nicolas Sarkozy (the epithet is the Economist’s, not mine), who demonstrated his political bona fides by speaking a lot without saying much, departed from the Australians’ suggestions, maintaining that Europe was in a different geopolitical situation than Australia. Sarkozy’s was also the only speech I heard that elicited a few gasps and disapproving murmurs from the audience when he mentioned in passing that he disagreed with Brexit (a divided Europe is weak). He concurred with Kuperwasser’s comment that the ultimate solution to Europe’s immigration problem lay with developing Africa.
Not all speakers, however, were as sanguine about Europe’s obligation to aid Africa. Pierre-Henri Dumont, of the French Republican Party, was thinking of French relations with its former colony Mali when he stated that aid to third world countries should be linked to their willingness to take back nationals that have been deported from Europe. (He added that migrants need to subscribe to laïcité and learn the language, history, and traditions of the host country. If refused, asylum migrants also should not be permitted to reapply for asylum in another EU country.) The political commentator Douglas Murray was sceptical even about the effectiveness of aid to Africa as a means to stymie the flow of migrants into Europe. Higher levels of disposal income will bring more, not fewer, people over. While this may be true, African development can also include means designed to limit the number of births in the first place, such as educating women and ensuring access to affordable forms of contraception.
On the home front in Hungary part of the government’s toolkit involves stimulating the birthrate, in addition to retraining workers, increasing employment, stimulating innovation and growth, and protecting Christian values. (Speaking of using individual examples to discuss an aggregate phenomenon, About Hungary, the English-language arm of the Hungarian government, has recently painted a picture of what an average family’s life will look like under Hungary’s “bold family policy”: http://abouthungary.hu/blog/hungarys-bold-family-policy-and-the-story-of-anna-and-peter/).
Hungary may find ways yet to avoid pariah status when it comes to circumventing the EU on the migrant issue. Contrary to Krikorian, who advocates withdrawing from the broad and ill-defined 1951 Refugee Convention, Gunnar Beck, an EU lawyer and legal theorist at SOAS University of London, encourages using that very convention against the EU. Beck argues that, e.g., where the EU grants family reunification, under international law, which assumes that refugees (to say nothing of economic migrants) will return home, European countries are obliged to do very little. If multiple countries act together in ignoring EU law (and Orbán too stressed the need for Hungary to have a large country, such as Italy, on its side in order to push its agenda through), it is unlikely that the EU will impose sanctions.
Immigrants’ expectations should be lowered in any case. Aimen Dean, a former undercover agent with the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, held up the Gulf countries as a model of sustainable integration. 90% of Dubai are foreigners. They get along because almost no foreigner has permanent residence or citizenship (they are granted long-term renewable residence instead, lasting some 10 to 15 years). This measure is meant to assure the native population that the country remains theirs, as well as deter foreigners from settling down in the first place. In this model, citizenship should be granted very sparingly and only in cases of merit, due to contributions in the fields of science, medicine, technology, security, military, and job creation. This would constitute a model of skills immigration, in Krikorian’s terms. Krikorian also identifies two other models: family-based immigration, where spouses and children of citizens (but not extended family) are permitted to join, and humanitarian immigration. All three models presuppose that no advanced society actually needs immigration. This crucial shift in mindset forces politicians and citizens to start the conversation by asking what kinds of people they actually want. Interestingly, Krikorian was also opposed to large scale refugee resettlement due to its cost. It is far more economical to provide aid to refugees and keep them where they are than to import them into Europe. Large scale refugee resettlement is therefore morally wrong and merely a form of virtue signalling, designed more to make us feel better than anything else.
This last point about virtue signalling seems relevant in this debate. Any discussion of migration strategy requires that we have a clear understanding of our definitions and concepts and the goals we wish to achieve (Radko Hokovsky at the European Values Think-Tank has already got the ball rolling with a discussion paper that provides a framework for policy debate as well as a variety of policy options: www.homeaffairs.cz/migrationpaper). Is immigration desirable for the sake of the immigrants or for our own sake? If we are importing the most disadvantaged echelons of society then the immigrants will probably benefit more than Europe would. If, however, we are importing only the most highly qualified labourers, and if we would like to pretend we are concerned with countries beyond our own, then we may want to ask ourselves if we have a moral right to deprive these foreign countries of their best and brightest (Contreras). Economic growth is possible without immigration – Japan is a case in point. The demographic data presented at the conference would almost lead me to suspect that, in the long run, regardless of our stance on immigration, we are bound to go the way of Japan.
However, if Fortress Europe will ultimately be overrun, then we might consider exercising our power, while we still have it, to share our values and virtues with those who will come to be our neighbours. Virtuous deeds needn’t consist only of welcoming migrants in a spirit of multiculturalism. After all, if multiculturalism is good for the West, why is it not good for the rest of the world (Clifford May, President of Foundation for Defense of Democracies)? Should we be so bold to consider remaking the world in our image? Whether we tend ultimately to a pro- or anti-migration stance, I am reminded of the words of Montesquieu: “[B]ut it has eternally been observed that any man who has power is led to abuse it; he continues until he finds limits. Who would think it! Even virtue has need of limits.” (Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, XI.4).
