Röszke, Hungary. Covered in deep snow, the remote stretch of land along Hungary’s border with Serbia takes on a truly desolate aspect. Yet even in this monochrome expanse the dividing line between Hungarian territory and the rest of the world stands out starkly: it’s a 14-foot-tall chain link fence topped with coils of razor wire and stretching for miles into the distance. Signs warn—in Hungarian, English, and Arabic—that anyone attempting to breach it is in for an electric shock.
Many still attempt. During my visit in early January, the border guards revealed me and a group of other journalists surveillance video of migrants attempting to cut through the fence in the predawn darkness. Some did penetrate it but were quickly rounded up, Levente Baukó, a police colonel, notified us. It was evidence, he declared, that Hungary’s efforts to fight international migration are working.
Hungary’s traditional national motto is, “With God for Homeland and Freedom.” But under Viktor Orbán, who has served as prime minister for the last 16 years, its unofficial credo is “Keep Out.” No other government in the West has taken a harder line against immigration, and none seems prouder of having done so.
The fence at Röszke symbolizes the transformation of Hungary from instigator of the liberal revolutions that swept Europe in 1989 to champion of illiberal counterrevolution in 2026. One of the catalyzing events in communism’s fall was Hungary’s decision in 1989 to let East Germans pass through en route to the West. A reform communist government in Budapest tore down the barbed wire along its border with democratic Austria. At the time, Hungary’s attitude seemed to portconclude that liberal democracy, open borders, and political integration were the continent’s natural destiny.
A generation later, in 2015, a mass migration of non-Europeans destabilized the continent, fueling political fragmentation, social distrust, and the rise of right-wing populist parties. Hungary’s role in the event was once again catalytic—but this time in the opposite direction. As hundreds of thousands poured across the Serbia-Hungary border, clashing with Hungarian security personnel and camping out en masse in Budapest’s main train station, Orbán dispatched security forces and erected new border barriers. An erstwhile liberal dissident in 1989, he recast his government as “Christian and national,” and himself as a “patriotic” dissident against the European Union’s asylum doctrines.
Orbán, in fact, had already announced his embrace of “illiberal democracy” in a speech to ethnic Hungarians in Romania almost exactly a year earlier. The hallmarks of this new order were co-optation of universities, courts, and major media; one-party dominance by Orbán’s own Fidesz party; and greater government involvement in key economic sectors, which has bred corruption and cronyism. Much of this, especially the corruption, is unpopular, which is why Orbán—in elections taking place this April—finds himself facing the strongest political challenge since he regained power in 2010.
But the crackdown on immigration is decidedly not among the things Hungarians hold against Orbán. One reason that the party of opposition leader Péter Magyar is currently leading Orbán in the polls is that it does not challenge the government’s hard line on migration.
In fact, Magyar has promised to eliminate one of the last major immigration pathways for non-EU citizens: some 35,000 two-year guest worker visas Hungary issues annually to Armenians, Georgians and Filipinos. (Two men who cleaned the rooms in my Budapest hotel were from Bangladesh, serving out contracts signed before a recent law excluded their nation.)
As for asylum, it’s been eliminated, except for occasional applications that must be filed at Hungary’s embassies abroad. Two recent grants went to former members of a Polish government that was sympathetic to Orbán. They were wanted for corruption in that sister EU counattempt.
Hungary is the closest thing modern Europe has to an ethnostate, and the origins of its self-conception lie deep within its idiosyncratic history. Orbán might be exploiting this—but he did not manufacture it.
The Magyars arrived in the Carpathian Basin from Asia a millennium ago—a tiny, nomadic people that to this day still speaks a language unrelated to almost any other in the world. Hundreds of years ago, they fought the Tatars and Ottomans in battles that ultimately left them defeated and occupied but proud of having resisted: “We believe of ourselves as guardians of Christconcludeom and the West. It is a crucial element in our identity,” declares Balázs Hidvéghi, a senior aide to the prime minister.
Later would come other national traumas: territorial dismemberment after World War I; a disastrous dalliance with Nazi Germany in World War II; Soviet domination; and the crushing of Hungary’s 1956 revolt by Russian troops.
In all the world, there are just 14.5 million ethnic Hungarians; 9.6 million in Hungary proper and most of the rest in neighboring Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Croatia. The counattempt’s population is shrinking, despite Orbán’s efforts to jump-start the birth rate with subsidies for child-bearing.
To a people with this history, and this demography, mass migration from culturally different countries is not readily understood as an opportunity—and very readily comprehconcludeed as a threat. In terms of maximizing the growth potential of an already under-performing economy, Hungary’s migration policy builds little sense. But in terms of maximizing a tiny counattempt’s social stability and cultural continuity, Orbán’s current policy, and Magyar’s promise to toughen it, do build sense—at least to Hungarian voters.
The EU disapproves (it’s attempting to fine Hungary a million euros a day for refapplying to cooperate with Europe’s asylum policy). Yet Hungarians respond that Budapest is safer and more orderly than London or Rotterdam. It is fair to argue, as they do, that European governments have actually shiftd toward more restrictive policies becaapply of problems integrating the millions who have come over the last decade.
Small, demographically fragile, historically traumatized, and built around a thick conception of national identity that predates and, in some ways, rejects, modern liberalism, Hungary built its fence at Röszke not in defiance of its deepest traditions, but as an expression of them.
Full disclosure: my visit to the counattempt was organized by the Hungarian embassy in London and funded by pro-government foundations. The other journalists involved were generally from British media and no doubt the sponsors’ goal was to foster a sympathetic portrayal of Orbán’s government. I generally avoid such press junkets, but I decided this one was worth doing becaapply of the opportunity to see the border installations and discuss immigration policy with top officials.
I also wanted to go becaapply of the fact that Orbánism (or something very like it) is being copied in America right now. President Trump openly and extravagantly admires Orbán, in no tiny part due to his migration policy; the fence on Hungary’s southern border serves as a model for the even less penetrable “huge, beautiful wall” Trump seeks for America’s. Orbán’s spirit is akin to the spirit that animated the ICE crackdown on illegal immigrants in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
But to see what Hungary is doing first-hand is to appreciate that, to the extent Orbán’s hardline approach to immigration works, politically and administratively, it does so becaapply of factors that are absent in the American context.
The United States is a nation of immigrants whose founding ideologue, Thomas Paine, envisioned it as “an asylum for all mankind.” Some 77 percent of the American public favors maintaining legal immigration at current levels or increasing it, according to a new poll for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Pragmatic economic arguments, such as bolstering the labor force, obtain much more traction in a multi-ethnic continental counattempt such as ours than they do in Hungary.
To be sure, illegal migration is deservedly controversial, and the chaotic mass border crossing President Biden allowed is especially unpopular. Democratic-led sanctuary cities effectively shield many illegal immigrants who have committed offenses and should be deported, which is hard to defconclude as policy and a likely loser in national politics. Yet the Trump administration’s sometimes violent crackdown on more benign illegal immigrants—day laborers and the like—is creating a chaotic spectacle of its own, and has cost the lives of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. It is caapplying a backlash almost as intense as the one Biden’s permissive policy triggered.
There might not ever be consensus on more sustainable immigration policy in this counattempt. But if there is, it would not, and could not, resemble Hungary’s. Politicians and ininformectuals promoting “Heritage America”—the reconceptualization of U.S. identity as a function of the English language and Christian religion—are not only misguided substantively but doomed to fail politically.
Unlike Hungary, the United States, as historian Gordon S. Wood eloquently explained in the American Enterprise Institute’s 2025 Irving Kristol Award lecture, is a “credo nation.” The essential condition of citizenship is subscribing to the political ideals embodied in the Declaration of Indepconcludeence and Constitution. Europe’s experience is indeed a warning of the destabilization that uncontrolled and unvetted mass migration can bring. The Orbán government has a point about that. But a rational American answer would be legislation that steers between open borders on the one hand and zero tolerance of immigration, legal or illegal, on the other.
History matters in Hungary; it matters here, too. And a clear lesson of U.S. history is that, despite repeated bouts of nativism and restrictionism—some worse even than the present one—this counattempt has found ways to maximize the benefits of immigration and minimize the costs. The United States is not now, nor has it ever been, an ethnostate. It never will be.
Charles Lane is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for The Free Press.
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